And Scotland - really just feels like New Zealand, except older. And perhaps colder (it's supposed to be summer here). The temperature was freezing after the 35-40 degrees we had come from in France. Twelve degrees on the ground at Edinburgh Airport, and threatening to rain - at least it won't be such a shock going back to the NZ winter from this. Everywhere we've gone so far, we've thought, "This feels like Christchurch... Wellington... Wanganui... Mt Eden."
We walked up the hill to the entrance to Edinburgh Castle, high up on a rocky cliff, where they are setting up for the military tattoo next month. The venue is smaller than it looks on the screen. in the streets around the castle, in "Old Edinburgh" there were all sorts of things going on, seemingly unaffected by the intermittent drizzle, and people everywhere. A jazz and blues festival, street performers, a parade of stiltwalkers and some men from a falconry organisation with a live falcon and a huge owl with enormous yellow eyes (Hannah thought she looked like Hedwig). We gave a donation to the falconers and Hannah got to hold the owl with a leather glove. The owl was only thirteen months old and fully grown, weighing eight pounds. She had hairy feet and huge talons an inch long. I think Hannah would like one as a pet, but I doubt she would enjoy feeding it live rats.
Further down the street we stopped to take photos at the statue of "Greyfriars Bobby" and to touch his brass nose - made shiny by all of the tourists - for luck.
The buildings here are not as grand or ornate as in Paris, but the Scots are more about practicality and hard work than about aesthetics. We drove through some nice leafy suburbs with high stone walls and then onto the motorway north to Perth, a nice city, much smaller than Edinburgh. We're staying here on our way north to the lochs. Perth has a very pretty setting amongst low hills with a large river, the Tay, winding through it. It doesn't get dark till 10.30pm, so we had plenty of time to go for a walk over the stone bridge built in the 1700s, explore the green parks along the river and the stopbank and flood gates that were built after a massive flood in 1993 that inundated 750 houses, and back over another bridge. There are marks on the bridge showing the heights of various floods over the centuries. We learnt an interesting bit of history about clan warfare in the 1300s. There had been a longstanding battle between two clans and they decided to settle it once and for all (in this location). They each gathered their best 30 warriors and faced each other for a battle to decide the winner. The king rang a starting bell and after a ferocious fight, eventually only 12 of the men were left - one from one clan and 11 from the other - the second clan clearly the winner. Luckily these days men can play rugby to settle their scores with fewer fatalities!
Tomorrow we will be having a Scottish breakfast (though I'll skip the black pudding!) and get on the road to do some exploring of this area.
Scotland day 2
We left Perth and drove along quiet country lanes to the lovely Loch Tay, where the Tay River originates. It was drizzling and freezing cold, but that seemed to add to the atmosphere. At Loch Tay the Scottish Underwater Archaeological Trust have set up the Crannog Centre. A crannog was a round house built over water by hunter-farmer families 2500 years ago. You can still see the remains of 18 of them in Loch Tay - some of them have become islands with trees. They took about a year to build and families sometimes lived in them for generations. The idea with a house over water was to save flat land for farming, to protect themselves from wild animals (a section of walkway could be removed at night to keep the crannog safe) and symbolically to have the protection of the water gods.
The archaeological trust has excavated these sites, worked out how the people lived and how the crannogs were built, and have created a replica at their visitors' centre. It was amazing to see how the Iron Age people could sharpen a tree trunk and drive it into the lake bed - lash a sturdy floor to concentric circles of these, build well insulated walls out of two layers of woven willow panels with bracken fern stuffed between them, and then a waterproof and breathable thatched roof and comfortable floor of bracken and wool. Up to 20 people and their animals lived in these. They also showed us the types of technology these people had, mostly involving bows to do things like turn wood on a primitive lathe, grind holes in stones to make loom weights and produce an ember to start a fire with a hard wood dowel on soft wood. We tried our hand at grinding grain with two stones (the arthritic wrists of the skeletons of the women from that era showed the effects of doing that for a lifetime!)
Afterwards, we had trouble opening the sealed packet of the new SD card we bought, without a pair of scissors, and I felt a little embarrassed that we have trouble solving even the most basic of problems these days - put us out in the conditions where our distant ancestors used to live, and I wonder how many of us would survive without supermarkets and department stores.
We went through Pitlochry, where we stopped to see the place where they make jewellery out of dyed and compressed heather stems. Our next stop was Loch Ness - the largest body of water in the UK (apparently big enough to submerge every person on earth three times over!) I had no idea it was that big. We stayed in a little town called Drumnadrochit and the next day explored the lake (OK, I admit it, I looked for Nessie - but she was nowhere to be seen), Urquhart Castle, a beautifully situated mediaeval stronghold that passed backwards and forwards between the English and Scottish, and the Loch Ness exhibition centre. We were intrigued by the history of the loch and the search for the Loch Ness monster - poor thing, she didn't have many places to hide with all the depth sounding, sonar, underwater cameras, and she has been talked out of existence by all the theorising about food sources, mirages and other visual illusions and Ice Age paleontology. Still, there were some very believable audio recordings of people who claimed they had seen Nessie, but there haven't been any sightings for a long time. Afterwards, Hannah and I went horse riding up above the loch on some nice ponies at a very English riding centre.
We decided to take the long route, through the Cairngorm National Park. It was well worth it - a narrow and mostly deserted road winding through a glacial valley between ancient weathered mountains with their patchwork of heather and bracken, little rivers and waterfalls and the ruins of stone buildings.
And here we are in Kyle of Lochalsh - near the bridge to the Isle of Skye. This morning we went for a coastal nature walk run by the Scottish Highlands Conservation Trust. The guide talked a lot about crofting, a system of rented allotments put in place in the 1800s by legislation designed to protect the old way of farming from the impossibly high rents placed on land during the Highland Clearances. These days, it costs around 20 pounds per year rental to run a croft, which also gives you the right to build a house and to use communal grazing lands up on the hills. People have to have other sources of income, but it's a lovely place to live and preserves the communities and ensures the land is looked after, so apparently these places are sought after and passed down the generations. Along the coast we saw a pair of sea otters, swimming quite close to the shore - a real thrill. We saw a Highland cow and her very young calf - like a cute little teddy bear.
This afternoon and tomorrow we'll do some driving and walking on the Isle of Skye.
It's been a while since I wrote anything, mainly because I've been enjoying myself so much and it almost seems a shame to take time to write about it.
Skye was huge and extremely cold and windy, but we found a lovely cafe with welcome shelter from the weather. I had the local specialty, "cullen skink", a smoked fish chowder with potatoes, and homemade brown bread - delicious. After the exorbitant prices of eating out in Scotland, we found the prices so reasonable.
We drove up over a spectacular connecting road and the windswept scenery was breathtaking. Sheep graze without fences and are often on the road, their self-shedding wool hanging off in messy clumps. Far below the road we could see peaty areas where turf had been dug. They still use it as fuel here - there are no trees to speak of.
The next day after leaving the (ahem) opulent luxury of the "Bespoke Hotel" in Kyle, we visited the Bright Water visitors' centre. This is very close to the island once owned by Gavin Maxwell, who wrote Ring of Bright Water. His cottages are still there, though dwarfed by the huge Skye Bridge (and no longer filled with clouds of cigarette smoke - he died young of lung cancer). We bought the three-in-one set of his books there, and happened to ask the lady behind the counter where Gavin Maxwell had lived with his otters when he wrote his famous book. She gave us directions and after a spectacular drive, a ferry ride and a stop for lunch in pouring rain, we parked on a backwoods road and made our way down the forestry roads with their recently felled trees, and then suddenly, just as the book describes, Camusfearna came into view. I found it interesting that there was no sign, no marked tracks, only a path through the grass which led over a stream (which could be crossed by two ropes) and on the site where Maxwell's house had been before it burnt down, a large rock with a plaque, covering the ashes of the author. It's such a pretty place with its white sand and rocky islands and Skye in the distance. I'm glad we made the effort to go there, and now the book will be more meaningful.
We drove down the west side of Scotland and through the Grampian mountains. It was a shame we didn't have longer, as I would have loved to go walking in the national park. It really is amazing with its glacial valleys and huge mountains rising each side of the road, still with snow in places. There are little lochs and waterfalls all along the way. We drove past Glencoe, the site where the Campbell clan infamously murdered their hosts, the McDonald clan, who had sheltered and fed them one snowy night in history. Still, at least one must have survived, as otherwise we wouldn't have the Golden Arches today (is that a good thing?)
We stayed near Loch Lomond, a pretty lake where Glaswegians go for their holidays. Then on to Glasgow airport where we caught our flight to Dublin. And here we are on the Emerald Isle, but more on that later.
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