The old bridge over the River Moriston is now bypassed. Its two unequal arches spring from bare rock, one spanning about sixty feet and the other forty-five, and beneath them the water breaks white over the falls. People call it the Telford Bridge, and Thomas Telford's Highland road of 1808 to 1811 did eventually run across it, though the rubble structure itself is older, mid-eighteenth-century work that Telford's engineers absorbed into their line. The parapet you lean on to watch the water was rebuilt in 1984.
This is where the River Moriston reaches Loch Ness, at the point the Great Glen meets the wooded side-valley of Glenmoriston running west. Forested slopes close in around the village, and higher up there is open moorland along the Great Glen Way, the 79-mile route that threads canal towpaths, forest tracks and roads the length of the glen. Many people who stop here are walking some part of it.
The Glenmoriston Arms Hotel is the village pub, and its Moriston Bar and Restaurant is where you end up after a day on the path. There is a garden for a summer drink, a wood burner for the other months, and a shelf of more than a hundred single malts. The kitchen leans Scottish: lamb shoulder with pancetta, mash and lamb jus; West Coast haddock and chips; Scottish mackerel with gazpacho and heritage tomatoes; ribeye au poivre; and a mushroom porridge with wild rice. Puddings run to dark-chocolate crémeux with Scottish strawberries and sticky-toffee with miso caramel.
For breakfast or a mid-walk stop, Glen Rowan Cafe sits close to the loch and does speciality coffee, homemade cake and a full Scottish breakfast with Stornoway black pudding, with smoked salmon and scrambled eggs and vegetarian and vegan versions as well. PeachieNess, a small gift and takeaway shop, sells locally made things, Scottish alcohol, and its own "Monster Bite" sandwiches, built on oversized rolls made specially for the shop. There is also a village shop with a post office.
The parish church was built in 1913 in Gothic form and endowed by Harriet Morrison in memory of her husband Frank. It has harled walls, a square crenellated tower whose clock faces are blind, and a hammer-beam timber roof over an octagonal pulpit; the Grant family, lairds of Glenmoriston, are remembered in mural memorials inside. A joint service is held here on the first Sunday of each month.
Older still is St Columba's Well, tied by tradition to the saint's sixth-century journey to King Bridei and long believed to cure. In the burial ground nearby, a stone from 1848 was raised by Peter McLeod for his father Finlay, Piper to Glenmoriston.
The glen keeps a harder memory too. After Culloden in 1746, seven local men hid Charles Edward Stuart for about a month under their leader Patrick Grant of Crasky. They could have turned him in for a reward of thirty thousand pounds, and instead obtained gingerbread for him.
Short walks fan out from the falls: the Falls Wood path follows the river up to a summer house set above the water, and the Glenmoriston Beastie Trail sends families around the glen collecting brass rubbings of twelve animals. Six miles west at Dundreggan, a rewilding centre offers everything from the level 916-metre Juniper Path to the steep four-kilometre Heather Path through regenerating woodland.
Inverness and its railway station are about thirty miles north up the A82, the same road that brings the Citylink coaches and the 312 bus past the village. But walkers step off the path to find the bridge and the sound of the water running under it.