Glen Lyon
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-> Strath Tay to Loch Tay
-> Glen Lyon
North of Ben Lawers, the mountains tumble down into Glen Lyon - at 34 miles long, the longest enclosed glen in Scotland. The narrow single track road down the glen starts at Keltneyburn, near Kenmore at the northern end of the loch, although a road does struggle over the hills past the Ben Lawers Visitor Centre to Bridge of Balgie, halfway down the glen, where the post office has an art gallery and does good tea and scones. Either way, it's a long, winding journey, much more the place for flights of imagination than tight deadlines. A few miles on from Keltneyburn, the village of FORTINGALL is little more than a handful of pretty thatched cottages, although locals make much of their 5000-year-old yew tree - believed (by them at least) to be the oldest living thing in Europe. The venerable tree can be found in the churchyard, showing its age a little but well looked after, with a timeline built into the pathway leading to it suggesting some of the events the yew has lived through. One of these, bizarrely, is the birth of Pontius Pilate, reputedly the son of a Roman officer stationed near Fortingall in the last years BC.
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