Inverness

Inverness stands at the mouth of the River Ness, where the Great Glen opens onto the Moray Firth. William the Lion made it a royal burgh, and Alexander II founded a Dominican friary there in 1233. The royal castle on the hill above the river commanded the roads into the Highlands, and the town suffered regular raids from the Hebrides, especially by the MacDonald Lords of the Isles in the 15th century. In 1428 James I summoned fifty clan chiefs to a parley at the castle; they were arrested one by one, and several were executed on the spot.

In 1562 Mary, Queen of Scots, found the gates shut against her by the governor of the castle, a man of the Earl of Huntly; local clans took the castle for her and she afterwards had him hanged. In the 1650s Cromwell's army built a citadel for 1,000 men beyond the town. In 1746 the Jacobites blew up the fort, shortly before the Battle of Culloden on the nearby moor.