Loch Ness

Loch Ness stretches through the Great Glen in the Scottish Highlands, southwest of Inverness. On its western shore stands Urquhart Castle, whose surviving remains date mainly from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. The castle figured in the Wars of Scottish Independence and later suffered raids by the MacDonald earls of Ross. It was granted to Clan Grant in 1509, but conflict continued; largely abandoned in the seventeenth century, it was partly destroyed in 1692. At the loch's southwestern end, an artificial island known as Cherry Island also bore a fortified building in the fifteenth century. In the early nineteenth century the loch became part of Thomas Telford's Caledonian Canal, joining natural waterways with constructed channels to link Scotland's east and west coasts.