Despite being part of one island, England and Scotland look nothing alike, due to the fact their geologies were actually conceived thousands of miles apart. About 550 million years ago, the planet's landmasses were all located in the Southern Hemisphere. Scotland belonged to the North American continent (part of Canada's Torngat Mountain Range) while England, Wales, and southern Ireland were united in the remains of a massive continent known as Gondwana. The two kingdoms that would one day form Great Britain were separated by a three-thousand-mile expanse of ocean, known as the Iapetus. After 75 million years of continental breakup and drift, the islands of Scotland and England collided—a million to one shot if ever there was one.

Today, Scotland's topography can be divided into two distinct regions: the Lowlands, densely populated with its industry and bustling cities, and the Highlands, a vast mountainous region rich in wildlife, surrounded by hundreds of coastal islands.

During the last ice age, which ended some ten thousand years ago, Scandinavia and the Scottish Highlands were buried beneath great expanses of glaciers. As these mountains of ice and snow moved, they deepened and rounded out the Highlands' existing river valleys, leaving behind deep lakes (lochs) and long valleys (glens).

Imagine one enormous trench splitting Scotland in two and you'd have the Great Glen. Spanning nearly seventy miles, this 400-million-year-old glacial rift is set upon a geological fault line that widened and deepened during the last ice age. When the ice finally retreated, it left behind a series of freshwater lochs that cut diagonally across the Highlands from the Atlantic to the North Sea. These four bodies of water have been connected to one another through a series of man-made locks, known collectively as the Caledonian Canal.

Completed in 1822, the Caledonian Canal spans twenty-two miles through the Great Glen, connecting the North Sea's Moray Firth to the Atlantic by way of Lochs Dochfour, Ness, Oich, and Lochy. Its most impressive feature is at Fort William, where "Neptune's Staircase" uses eight locks to raise and lower vessels seventy feet above sea level.

We were traveling along the east bank of the Ness River when Max surprised me by making a quick left, following a winding access road up to Inverness Castle.

"We're not going to Portfield Prison?"

The attorney-slash-Goth freak shook his spiked head. "Portfield's overcrowded, and the labdicks don't want to mix an accused murderer in with the rest of the remands, most of the wankers being held for nothing more than bar brawls. So the High Court plucked our father from Her Majesty's Prison and shoved him inside the bowels of the Sheriff Court."

By "Sheriff Court," Max meant Inverness Castle.

Originally built in the twelfth century, Inverness Castle was reconstructed in 1835 after nearly being razed by Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1746. Besides being a popular tourist attraction, the enormous Victorian red sandstone, sitting majestically on a low-lying cliff overlooking River Ness, also housed the Sheriff Court.