Loch Ness

The water is dark, still and deeper than the North Sea — some 230 metres of peat-stained freshwater filling a crack in the Earth's crust that runs clean across Scotland. Loch Ness holds more water than every lake in England combined, and standing on its shore you understand why people have projected mysteries onto it for centuries. The surface is so vast and so black that anything could be down there.

Loch Ness floods a long reach of the Great Glen, the fault line that splits the Highlands from coast to coast. Urquhart Castle's ruins jut from a headland at one of the widest points, tower commanding the deepest water, and the loch's scale reads best from the shore path or the castle tower itself. The Caledonian Canal links the loch to Inverness in the north-east and Fort William in the south-west along a flat towpath for cyclists and walkers, and at Fort Augustus a staircase of working locks lifts boats between loch and river levels. The monster story is older than most visitors guess: Adomnán wrote it down around AD 700, describing an encounter attributed to Saint Columba in the sixth century, and sonar surveys still occasionally register large, unexplained echoes. A rewarding day here rests on landscape, engineering and ruins — the folklore is the seasoning, not the meal.