THE CANAL

Loch Ness is one of four lochs that make up the Caledonian Canal. We’ve got Loch Linhe, Loch Lochy, Loch Oich and Loch Ness. 

The Caledonian Canal is sixty-three miles, or one hundred kilometers long, and runs from the bottom of Loch Linhe to Inverness – the capital of the Scottish Highlands. 

In the late 1700’s, Britain was at war with France. Many ships were being destroyed, and many ships were being diverted around the North West coast of Scotland where the sea is extremely rough.

Someone looked at the map and decided to link these lochs together to link the North Sea with the Atlantic Ocean. James Watt, the engineer, was commissioned to carry out a survey of this area in the late 1700’s. He was known as the father of the Industrial Revolution.  

James Watt designed a condenser which improved the steam engine and after carrying out the survey in this area, a man called Thomas Telford was commissioned to design and construct the Caledonian Canal.  

Out of the sixty miles, only twenty-two miles are actually man made. The rest are natural bodies of water like Loch Lochy.

Thomas Telford employed over six hundred men from the Highlands to dig this canal by hand. It was back-breaking work – the ground was very hard with lots of rocks, tree roots and obstacles getting in the way. And the canal took nineteen years to construct.

One of the great challenges they faced was that the lochs were sitting at different levels. Between Loch Linhe and Loch Lochy, seventy feet separates these two lochs. So a series of lock systems had to be created to allow the boats to go from one loch to the other.

They started constructing this canal in 1803. It was initially finished in 1822 but further work was carried out to make the canal deeper. By the time the canal was finished, the wars with France were now over. 

Boats had gotten larger and many of your wooden boats had been replaced by metal boats. Many of these metal boats did not fit into the Caledonian Canal and these metal boats could navigate the rough seas around Scotland better than a wooden one.

The canal became useless and very nearly closed down but today, thankfully, it has been saved. Today, you see lots of pleasure craft and chartered cruises carrying tourists from all over the world, coming here to sail up and down the Caledonian Canal.