We were driving back from a road-trip to Glen Garry, where we’d been admiring the spectacle of autumn colours: birch, beech and aspen dripping in luminous shades of yellow and gold, and the distant Knoydart hills burnished bronze with bracken and heather. But we didn’t get far down the lonely road to Kinlochhourn before the sky turned an ominous grey and squalls started to rattle the car with sleet. It was almost as if we saw autumn merge into winter that afternoon: Ben Nevis and the surrounding hills were wearing new shawls of white, and the peaks of Glen Coe had a similar sprinkling.

On the outskirts of Fort William we noticed a sign to Inverlochy Castle and turned off on impulse, to see what it looked like. I wasn’t expecting great things, largely because we seemed to be in the middle of an industrial estate. It didn’t feel like the right place for a grand-sounding fortress.