Walk into the passage of the north-east cairn

See how the passages line up with the midwinter sunset

Walk the ring of standing stones around each cairn

Find the kerb stones carved with cup marks

The Balnuaran of Clava lie in a grove of trees by the River Nairn: three Bronze Age cairns in a line running north-east to south-west, the two at the ends passage graves with their entrances oriented south-west towards the midwinter sunset, each ringed by standing stones. The site gave its name to the whole class of Clava cairns, and the Culloden battlefield is a couple of miles away.

Clava Cairns: Bronze Age Tombs Aligned on the Midwinter Sun

Culloden and Nairn

The North Coast 500 as a loop from Inverness: dolphins off Chanonry Point, the cliffs of Duncansby and Dunnet Head, Smoo Cave and Sandwood Bay, Handa's seabirds and Suilven, then the Bealach na Bà and Culloden.

The North Coast 500

Find the remains of the holly tree in the lowest room of Cawdor's tower

Walk the Culloden battlefield and the clan graves

Cawdor Castle was built around a living holly tree, which testing shows died about 1372; the remains are still in the lowest level of the tower, and the earliest document for the castle is a licence to fortify granted in 1454 to William Calder, 6th Thane of Cawdor. Shakespeare made Macbeth Thane of Cawdor, but the play never names the castle and it was built long after the real king's time. Eleven kilometres away, the Jacobite army of Charles Edward Stuart was destroyed at Culloden on 16 April 1746 in a battle that lasted less than an hour, and the coast road runs on to Nairn and its beaches.

Cawdor, Culloden and Nairn: The Holly Tree and the Last Battle on British Soil

Watch for bottlenose dolphins from Chanonry Point on a rising tide

See Stevenson's lighthouse of 1846 at the point

Visit Hugh Miller's birthplace cottage in Cromarty

Chanonry Point runs out into the Moray Firth on a spit between Fortrose and Rosemarkie, and is one of the best places in the UK to watch bottlenose dolphins from the shore, especially on an incoming tide when they fish the current. Alan Stevenson's lighthouse at the tip was first lit in 1846. Along the coast at Cromarty, the geologist Hugh Miller was born on 10 October 1802, and his birthplace cottage is kept as a museum.

The Black Isle: Chanonry Point Dolphins and Hugh Miller's Cromarty

Walk the path from the A832 through the cloth-hung trees to the spring

Look at which rags have rotted away and which have not — the custom needs cloth that decays, and synthetic rags defeat it

Find the spring at the centre of the trees, dedicated to Saint Curetán

Drive on to Chanonry Point, the spit between Fortrose and Rosemarkie, to watch for bottlenose dolphins on a rising tide

The Clootie Well near Munlochy on the Black Isle — Tobar Churadain in Gaelic — is an ancient spring dedicated to Saint Curetán, and rags are still tied to the bushes and trees round it. The belief was that the well could cure: you dipped a rag in the water, tied it to a branch, and as the cloth rotted away the illness went with it. Sick children were once left beside it overnight in the hope of a cure. Forestry and Land Scotland, which looks after it, asks visitors to leave only small, biodegradable cloths.

The Munlochy Clootie Well

Take a boat trip on Loch Ness, 37km long and 229.8m deep, with more water than all the lakes of England and Wales combined

Visit the Loch Ness Experience in Drumnadrochit, formerly the Loch Ness Centre, on the story of the monster first brought to world attention in 1933

Explore Urquhart Castle, the medieval ruin on the loch's western shore

Look down the loch from the ruins of Urquhart Castle, where several of the best-known monster photographs were taken

Loch Ness is 37km long and 229.8m deep and holds more water than all the lakes in England and Wales combined. Drumnadrochit on the western shore has the Loch Ness Experience, which sets out the evidence and the explanations, and Urquhart Castle stands on Strone Point, where some of the best-known monster photographs were taken.

Loch Ness Monster Hunt

See the pump room and taste the sulphur water if it is running

Visit the Highland Museum of Childhood in the old station

Walk up to the Touchstone Maze above the village

Sulphurous springs found in the 18th century turned Strathpeffer into a Victorian spa resort, with a pavilion of 1880 built to entertain the visitors and a railway branch to bring them in. The pump room still stands, the old station now holds shops and the Highland Museum of Childhood, and the Rogie Falls and Ben Wyvis are on the doorstep.

Strathpeffer: The Victorian Spa in the Highlands

Tour the Glenmorangie distillery and see the tallest stills in Scotland

Find St Duthus Collegiate Church, the heart of the medieval pilgrimage

Find out why James IV came to Tain every year

See the Tolbooth and, from April to October, the Tain & District Museum and Clan Ross Centre

Tain was granted its first royal charter in 1066 by Malcolm III, making it Scotland's oldest royal burgh: a sanctuary under the protection of the church, built round the shrine of St Duthac, which by the late Middle Ages was one of the great pilgrimages of Scotland — James IV came at least once a year throughout his reign. Just outside the town is Glenmorangie: William Matheson turned the Morangie brewery, which shared the Tarlogie Spring, into a distillery in 1843 with two second-hand gin stills, and it has the tallest stills in Scotland.

Tain: Scotland's Oldest Royal Burgh and Glenmorangie

Spend an afternoon in the bookshops of Hay

Visit Hay Castle, restored and opened to the public in 2022

Hay has more than twenty bookshops, is the National Book Town of Wales and holds the Hay Festival every spring. South of the town a single-track road climbs between Hay Bluff and Twmpa to the Gospel Pass at 549m, the highest road pass in Wales, then drops down the Vale of Ewyas past Llanthony Priory towards Abergavenny.

Hay-on-Wye and the Gospel Pass: Books and the Highest Road in Wales

Find the Iguanodon with its thumb spike on its nose

Walk the whole island circuit and count the extinct animals

See the Megalosaurus and compare it with what we know now

Walk the terraces of the old Crystal Palace site above the lake

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins built these life-sized models for the Crystal Palace park under the direction of Richard Owen, the anatomist who coined the word Dinosauria, and they were unveiled in 1854 — the first dinosaur sculptures in the world. They are wrong in ways that are now famous: the Iguanodon stands on four legs with its thumb spike on its nose. That is the point of them.