West Highland Line

A wet Sunday is as good a day as any to visit Cruachan Power Station on Loch Awe.

If you hadn't been told umpteen times how amazing it was, you might have been thrilled and overwhelmed. Instead, it was slightly disappointing. The initial drive into the tunnel was exciting enough, but the fact that you only get to see the turbine hall through a window, high-up at one end, means you don't really experience the technological sublime so much as have it laboriously pointed out to you through statistics and comparisons.

What was impressive, though, was the tour guide. He really knew his stuff, was humorous, relaxed and informative. And best of all, he didn't let his enthusiasm for the engineering stop him from acknowledging the human cost. The men who, in the early 1960s, drilled into the granite of Ben Cruachan, set charges and cleared the rubble, over and over again, worked in appalling conditions. The guide said some of them come back to visit. 'You can spot them a mile off,' he says. 'Men in their seventies, barely able to walk, the best years of their lives long behind them.'

Incidentally, the guided tour (normally six quid) is free if you make your way there by public transport or bicycle. A crafty special offer. Judging by the reactions of the train crew and the visitor centre staff, we might have been the first people ever to have used the station (which is officially only open during the summer anyway), and anyone cycling on the A85 would be quite insane.