Finding the Devil’s Pulpit

The next stop on my Scotland excursion was Finnich Glen. If you happen to go to Loch Lomond, I’d stop by Finnich Glen! It’s only a 20 minute drive from the lake.

A little story about Finnich Glen: This had been something I had researched months before I made it to the UK. It was also what I was most excited for. Finnich Glen is a little natural..canyon like structure in the Scottish countryside. It’s almost a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it feature. From the outside it looks like a woodland, easily something you’d like to drive past. It’s not until you get out of the car and walk into the trees that you notice there may be anything there at all. It took me forever to figure out how to get in, before I even got there! After looking through several blogs and maps, I was fairly confident I’d find it…

Until I got there. I noticed that there were a few parties wandering the trees and the side of the road, looking for an in as well. Blogs that I had looked into had talked about some wall with a gate you had to climb over…but as far as you could see, the wall stretched around the whole of it, it was hard to determine which gate you needed to locate.

After about 15 minutes of wandering around, we took a leap of faith and crawled through a whole in a fence…which led us to the right place!

From the top looking down, there is quite a bit of a drop. If you do happen to visit, please be careful! Don’t get too close to the edge.

After walking the edge of the glen for about 15 minutes, we finally found the stairs leading down. Again, if you do decide to visit, be very, very careful. The steps are steep, wet, and muddy, and there is no place to grip and hold on to without getting fairly dirty. Make sure you wear shoes that can grip and possibly wouldn’t mind throwing out at the end of it!

But if you do make it to the bottom, it’s well worth the trouble.

Down the river a bit, you finally glance what they call the Devil’s Pulpit.

I think it is so named because it looks like a church that has been placed practically in the depths of hell. The rest of the glen is beautiful, green, and covered in moss.