Day 7: Highland Titles and Lower Falls Glen Nevis
One reason for travelling to Scotland was to visit our own estates. Own estates? You read that right. For example, my parents can call themselves Laird and Lady of Glencoe because they each own a small plot of land in Scotland. Of course, these are only symbolic titles with no real legal claim to regency. And the plots of land are also too small to derive any economic benefit from them. But that is not the point. By purchasing a plot of land in the Highland Titles Nature Reserve, you are securing a piece of nature for restoration and renaturalisation. The renaturation program aims to replace non-native tree species and monocultures with naturally occurring species and promote biodiversity. The purpose of the program is to protect the land from private and commercial companies that want to use it as building land. After all, if someone wanted to use land for building, livestock or farmland, they would have to obtain permission from all landowners or buy the land. This would mean a huge amount of work due to the number of individual landowners alone. Apart from the sustainable idea of preserving nature, being allowed to call oneself Laird or Lady appeals to the sense of humour of many people and can also be an expression of one’s own attachment to Scotland as a country.
The Highland Titles Nature Reserve near Duror has a visitor centre and is definitely worth a visit. We first followed the A828 along Loch Linnhe towards Oban. Hidden between the trees, a narrow road leads to the Highland Titles Visitor Centre. We missed the entrance at first because it was quite inconspicuous.
As a landowner, you can visit your own patch of earth directly and take part in a free guided tour (included with the purchase of the title). Using an app, you should be able to enter your coordinates and navigate to the location yourself. However, the app didn’t work as well as it should have, which could have been due to the lack of a mobile phone network. But no problem, the rangers there are super friendly. So if you have bought a plot of land but have forgotten your registration details (or the app doesn’t work), you can also get a printout with the coordinates on site. With our own GPS device and the printout in hand, we set off in search of our plots. We found them near the circular trail. However, this part of the forest is to be cleared in the medium term, as mainly non-native Sitka pines were growing there in rows and these are to be reforested with native species.
We walked round the lake, watched the little grebes and kept an eye out for wildcats in the wooded areas. Unfortunately, no sightings were made.
It is also worth noting that a hedgehog hospital has been set up as a rehabilitation centre for injured hedgehogs.
Back at the visitor centre, we talked to a local ranger, who told us a lot about the wildlife in the reserve and other interesting facts. He showed us pictures of the wild cats taken with a wildlife camera and told us about current and future programmes in the reserve. He also gave us a tip for some castles and the Glen Nevis waterfalls near Fort William, and we showed him the unknown bird species in the photos that we had discovered the day before on Loch Lochan. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell us what species it was. But he told us to send the photos to the Highland Titles email address and that the experts would have another look at them.
To round off the day, we actually stopped off at the Glen Nevis waterfalls, the Lower Falls, on the way back to Fort William. The car park ‘Lower Falls Car Park’ seems to be quite new and even has its own bus stop. We then walked a little further along the road to a bridge over the Water of Nevis. Between the individual smaller waterfalls, we observed a grey wagtail that kept drawing attention to itself and hopping from stone to stone. However, when it started to rain, we quickly had to pack up our photo equipment again and cut short our stay there.
Zufrieden vom Tag freuten sich die Lairds and Ladys auf eine warme Tasse Tee in unserer Unterkunft. Schließlich war dies auch der letzte Abend hier. Die Taschen mussten noch gepackt werden. Am nächsten Tag war Abreise Richtung Inverness.
Glen Nevis Waterfall can be seen on the right through the gap in the rocks and running downstream
