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Fort Augustus b&b, guesthouse and hotel accommodation

Fort Augustus in Highland

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Visit Fort Augustus and the surrounding villages and stay in bed & breakfast accommodation:

Fort Augustus, Highland, is a village in the Great Glen or large fracture that divides Scotland from North East to South West by way of Loch Ness, and it stands on the fine modern highway through Glen More, partly on the line of General Wade's road of 1725—6. It once held a Hanoverian outpost against insurgent Jacobite Highlanders, and later a Benedictine abbey and school were founded here. It is a well-known angler's resort, situated at the South West end of Loch Ness, near the place where it is entered by the Caledonian Canal. Once it was known as Kilcumin, which is Gaelic for the cell or church of Cumin, an early Iona abbot.

After the Jacobite rising of 1715, the Hanoverian Government decided to garrison this point, commanding Glen Tarif to the South and thus also the Corrieyairack Pass. In 1716 the barracks was built, one wall of which still stands in the grounds of what is now the Lovat Arms Hotel. The first fort was built by General Wade in 1730; it was named after William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. It was capable of holding 300 men. In 1746, during the last Jacobite Rising, it was captured by the Highlanders after a two-day siege during which a shell exploded the powder magazine. Re-occupied by Hanoverian troops after the Battle of Culloden, the fort was reconstructed and garrisoned and remained so until the Crimean War.

In 1867, by which time Jacobitism in the Highlands of Scotland was held to be no more dangerous than a romantic dream (had not Queen Victoria proclaimed herself an ardent Jacobite?), the Government sold the fort and lands to Lord Lovat for £5,000; he presented it to the Catholic Benedictine Order for the erection of an abbey and school. The foundation-stone was laid in the same year, and the college was opened in 1878. It was completed in 1880 and raised to abbey status in 1882 with the name of St Benedict's. Those who have a taste for irony may observe with some amusement that a part of the old Hanoverian fort is carefully preserved in the North West corner. The same sort of preservation is shown in the Pantheon at Rome.

Cloisters in the Early English style, and other parts, were built by Peter Paul Pugin, son of the famous Pugin, in 1893, while the school and clock-tower were designed by Joseph Hansom, the inventor of the hansom cab. The Romanesque church by Richard Fairlie was begun in 1914. In passing, one may remark that the site was originally Benedictine property, being given in 1232 to the Beauly Priory, then being granted by the last prior at the Reformation to Lord Lovat in 1558. A later Lord Lovat, the famous Simon of the '45, forfeited the land for his part, or suspected part, in the Rising of 1715.

The foundation of St Benedict's was colonized by monks from the Schottenkloster at Ratisbon, which was founded by St Marianus of Dunkeld in 1074 and dissolved in 1863. After the Reformation, Ratisbon continued connections with what remained of native Scottish Catholicism; and the colonization of the new Benedictine Abbey in the Highlands from Ratisbon could not have been more appropriate. In the early days, however, there were a number of continental monks. As part of their duties was to attend to remote parts of the Scottish Highlands, some of the monks learned Gaelic. One, a Slav, succeeded so well that he was able to publish a reliable Gaelic dictionary and grammar.

In the far corner of Fort Augustus's Protestant Churchyard is the grave of John Anderson, a carpenter who died here in 1832. He was an old friend of Robert Burns, and is said to have made the poet's coffin. Anderson's name lives in the poem “John Anderson, My Jo John”.

There are Forestry Commission developments on the western shores of Loch Ness, which include the newly founded village of Inchnacardoch, 1 mile North of Fort Augustus.

A little South West along Glen More, and at the head of Loch Oich, is Aberchalder Lodge, where Prince Charles Edward Stuart reviewed 2,000 men on his march South on the 27th of August 1745.

Nearby cities: Inverness

Nearby towns: Fort William

Nearby villages: Dornie, Drumnadrochit, Invergarry, Invermoriston, Kyle of Lochalsh

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Accommodation in Fort Augustus:

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