Beauly is pronounced Bew-lee, which tells you something about the layers of language in this part of Scotland. The name is said to come from the French beau lieu, a beautiful place, supposedly an exclamation of Mary, Queen of Scots when she visited in the sixteenth century, though the monks who founded the priory in 1230 had already given it the name. Whatever the truth, the ruined priory still stands beside the main street, a red sandstone shell with traceable arches and a quiet graveyard, and it is worth ten minutes before you eat.
The town itself is small, about fourteen hundred people, built around a broad market square with a tall statue at one end and a row of dignified old buildings around it. It sits on the Beauly Firth, at the point where the river runs out of Strathglass into the sea, and the farmland around it is low and fertile, quite unlike the mountains you have just been riding. That contrast is a good reason to stop here at the end of a day in Glen Affric or on the way in from the Black Isle. Beauly has been a dependable place for lunch for as long as riders have been coming this way, with bakeries, cafes and a couple of pubs within a hundred metres of the square, and the shops are the sort that sell tweed, whisky and good oatcakes rather than souvenirs.
The roads around it are gentle. The A862 runs east toward Inverness along the firth, flat and fairly quick, and the road west toward Kiltarlity and Drumnadrochit climbs into forests and turns more interesting, with good surfaces, moderate gradients and a series of long bends. The valley carries a surprising amount of farm traffic, so pay attention at the junctions. Weather here comes off the Moray Firth and is often drier than the west, and in autumn the light across the firth is some of the best in the Highlands.
For fuel, Muir of Ord is four kilometres away and has a few thousand people, which is plenty to guarantee a pump; Dingwall, a bit further, is a proper market town with more options. Beauly itself is for sitting down, a pot of tea and a decent sandwich, before you take the road toward the loch.