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

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

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

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

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

Cross Fowler's suspension bridge over the gorge

Look up at the 46m Falls of Measach from the viewing platform

Walk the woodland trail along the rim of the gorge

Corrieshalloch is a gorge 1.5km long and 60m deep but only about 10m wide at the lip, cut by meltwater at the end of the last ice age along lines of weakness in the Moine rock. The Falls of Measach drop 46m into it, seen from a Victorian suspension footbridge built by Sir John Fowler, one of the designers of the Forth Bridge, and from a viewing platform further down. At 7 hectares it is the smallest of Scotland's national nature reserves.

Corrieshalloch Gorge and the Falls of Measach

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

Find the 617 Squadron memorial in the village

See the Dambusters bar at the Petwood Hotel

Watch a film at the Kinema in the Woods, still rear-projected

Walk the pinewoods and the site of the old spa baths

Thomas Hotchkin found iodine and bromine-rich water in a disused mine shaft on his land around 1834 and built a spa bath beside it, and a pine-wood town grew up around the cure. In the Second World War the RAF took over its hotels: 617 Squadron, the Dambusters, were based nearby and used the Petwood as their officers' mess, and the squadron's memorial stands in the village.

Woodhall Spa: Iodine Water and the Dambusters

Walk Rock Park and find the old pump room and chalybeate spring

Walk round the ornamental lake made in the 1870s

Look at the Victorian ironwork and verandas along the streets

Visit the Radnorshire Museum for the story of the spa

Llandrindod grew into a spa town in the 19th century around springs whose healing qualities had drawn visitors since the mid-18th. In the season, between May and mid-September, people took the waters at the pump rooms in Rock Park and at the Pump House Hotel with orchestras playing, and an ornamental lake was made out of marshland in the early 1870s.