Foyers

The Falls in Poetry

Below the car park at Upper Foyers, a stepped path drops into the gorge where the River Foyers pours about a hundred feet through the trees before it reaches Loch Ness. The full circuit down to the shore and back is 4.5 kilometres, an hour and a half to two hours of walking, with 152 metres of climbing and two viewpoints onto the fall. The steps are steep and the drops are real, so it is not a route for a pushchair.

Robert Burns came here in September 1787 and wrote the poem standing by the water: "Among the heathy hills and ragged woods / The roaring Fyers pours his mossy floods." Wordsworth later recommended the fall to a traveller heading north. The falls are free to visit year-round.

A Small Village Table

You are on the quieter south side of Loch Ness, roughly twenty miles from Inverness, and the village is small. Foyers Stores holds the shop, café and Post Office together in one building; a community effort to buy it secured a Scottish Land Fund award of 365,611 pounds in December 2025 and set about raising the rest to keep it in local hands.

For eating, the Camerons Tearoom and Farm Shop sits at Glenlia Farm. Deer and Highland cattle graze outside, there are benches for fine days and a wood-burning stove for the rest, and the kitchen turns out home baking, freshly ground coffee, homemade soups and sandwiches.

Loch Views and Hydropower

Several places pour a drink with a loch view. The Wee Dram at Foyers House stocks more than a hundred whiskies and invites you to ask for a dram matched to each course; the menu runs to haggis, neeps and tatties with whisky cream and oatcakes, venison sausage with mash and a red-wine sauce, stoved chicken, hand-cut Scottish sirloin and a goat's-cheese tart. The Craigdarroch Hotel, ten rooms overlooking Loch Ness or woodland, serves dinner and a Sunday roast to non-residents. At Foyers Lodge, the chef Venesa sends out puddings that carry the place name — a Foyers Lodge brûlée with rum and raisins, date-and-ginger pudding with Loch Ness vanilla ice cream, and an affogato to finish; outside diners are accepted by prior arrangement.

It was the aluminium works, more than the poetry, that shaped the modern village. In 1896 the British Aluminium Company harnessed the water for Britain's first hydro-electrically powered aluminium smelter, with Lord Kelvin advising and the artist Mary Rose Hill Burton campaigning against what she saw as the ruin of the falls. The works brought more than 250 jobs, a church, a school and, by the 1901 census, 343 people; a red-granite fountain marked both Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and the founding of the village. The original hydro station ceased operation in 1967, and the pumped-storage scheme that replaced it was completed in 1975, still moving water between Loch Ness and Loch Mhòr.

Trails and the Road to Foyers

Walkers have more than the falls. The South Loch Ness Trail runs 5.1 kilometres from Inverfarigaig up to Upper Foyers, waymarked with blue squirrel posts and passing a rocky stretch with a chain to hold; the same trail forms part of the 80-mile Loch Ness 360°, which links Foyers with Fort Augustus and Dores. A short drive towards Fort Augustus reaches the Suidhe viewpoint and Loch Tarff, and just north at Inverfarigaig, Farigaig Forest has woodland trails and a picnic spot at the Magic Loch.

Getting here is by road: the B852 threads through the village and meets the B862, the old General Wade line between Inverness and Fort Augustus. The 302 bus links Inverness to Dores, Inverfarigaig and both Lower and Upper Foyers on weekdays, with three journeys each way on Saturdays.

Late Afternoon at Glenlia Farm

Come back up from the gorge in the late afternoon and the tearoom fire is lit, the deer out in the field, and the loch flat and grey below the trees.