Invergordon's harbour was established in 1828, and I felt that history the moment we docked – deep water that once sheltered the Royal Navy's Atlantic Fleet now welcomes cruise ships. This town became a police burgh in 1863, but it's the naval legacy that shapes the shoreline: the institute designed in 1914 by Edinburgh architect Stewart Kaye still stands, a dignified reminder of when battleships, not tour coaches, defined this place.

Walking the waterfront, I thought about September 1931. On the 11th, ten warships of the Atlantic Fleet steamed into Cromarty Firth – Hood, Adventure, Dorsetshire, Malaya, Norfolk, Repulse, Rodney, Valiant, Warspite, York. The sailors learned from newspaper reports, not official channels, that their pay would be slashed. By the evening of September 12th, they gathered on the football field. What followed on September 15th and 16th was extraordinary: twelve thousand ratings carried out a non-violent mutiny. Crews of HMS Hood and HMS Nelson simply refused everything except essential harbour duties. No violence. No drama. Just quiet, unified defiance.

The ripples reached London instantly. The Stock Exchange panicked, there was a run on the pound, and by September 21st Britain was forced off the Gold Standard – an economic earthquake that changed the course of the 1930s. The Cabinet capped all service pay cuts at ten percent that same day. Standing in this quiet harbour, it's hard to imagine those battleships anchored where our ship sits, or that such a peaceful act of protest rewrote financial history. Since 1978, the former naval base has welcomed cruise passengers instead of warships – a gentler purpose for these deep waters.

We boarded the coach at 8 a.m. and were on the banks of Loch Ness by 9:30 – the water black and still, Urquhart Castle ruins dramatically perched on the shore. The Jacobite cruise took us halfway down the loch while the guide told monster stories and sonar pinged the 230-meter depths. No definitive sighting, but we saw ripples that made hearts race.

In the afternoon we went to Cawdor Castle – Shakespeare's Macbeth connection, still lived in by the Dowager Countess, gardens bursting with roses and a maze we got gloriously lost in. We had lunch – Cullen skink soup and whisky on the boat, creamy smoked haddock that tastes like the Highlands distilled. The pros: real Scottish Highlands without overnighting. The cons: long coach day, but the scenery makes time disappear.