Unplanned "Power" Sidetrip

We had a choice today driving south from Inverness, either take the motorway through

Walking across the dam

Perth, or go through the mountains cross country. I was rested so I though I’d be fine on the secondary roads for another day, so we took the scenic route, “The Tourist Route” according to the signs.

We stopped at the town of Pitlochry for lunch and I saw a sign for a dam and dam visitor’s

The fish ladder

center. We had enough time on the parking so we wandered down to the dam. This was one of Hydro Scotland’s power generating plants and had been opened to the public as a tourist attraction. It is on a beautiful location, and the dam has created a lake behind it adding to the attraction.

Footpath across river

Although the actual hydro plant is not open to the public, you can walk across the dam and look down into the plant through windows, although you can’t actually see much. There are interpretive signs explaining everything however. Once across the dam, there is a long fish ladder to allow salmon to get up the river past the dam. They have built an observation area where you can look into the ladder to see the fish climbing up. Although we did not see any fish, there is a digital counter that keeps track of how many fish swim up and the how large

Back to town

they are. This season, 4,091 salmon have used the fish ladder.

Lunch time

Walking over the dam we saw a footbridge downstream which would lead us back into the town, so we walked down along the river and crossed the bridge to a trail through the woods back to the town where we stopped to eat lunch.

On this part of the trip we have the time to do things like this. We only had a drive of about three hours, so it was nice to be able to see attractions like this which were not in our plans and fit them into the adventure.