England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales!
Part Four: SCOTLAND!!!! 🏴
Spoiler alert: there's gonna be some COOS in this segment!
We put a TON of miles on the car, and spent way too many hours driving ridiculous distances. Honestly, we tried to pack too much into this trip, again. But it was all worth it!
Inverness
As fans of the book series Outlander, we put Inverness as one of our must-see spots in the trip.
Inverness is an alarmingly long way away from anything :)
It's really pretty, though!
Lish found us a gorgeous little AirBnB, one lane back from the river.
I gleefully went to work making a home-cooked meal!
Salmon fillets, pan-fried in lemon, sweet potato mash with a ton of butter, steamed broccolini.
Sometimes you just want clean protein and fresh veggies!
The riverside is serene and beautiful.
Inverness Castle
- some fun history to be read here on the Wikipedia page.
We spent a long time at Culloden.
Their museum exhibition is really well done. It follows corridors around, where on one side is the Jacobite story, and on the other is the English view of things. Yet more education on what arseholes the British have been to other nations down through history.
There are stones set around the field, with the names of the clans engraved on them. Most of them are just free-standing in the grass. The Fraser headstone, however, has been fenced off for its own safety (from overwrought fans of the series, no doubt!)
We saw a flock of (I'm assuming) starlings!
Quite near to Culloden is a grove with standing stones and cairns.
The cairns are keyhole-shaped.
It was a really quiet, magical spot.
Lish booked us a COO TOUR !!!
Stand by to be spammed with pics of stupidly cute coos.
The farm overlooks Loch Ness.
How pretty is it here!
Please note gorgeous ruined castle on the point. We'll be visiting that, later.
This guy's name is Haggis!
He's the father of the three small calves (to two cows):
Wallace is the slightly larger calf, and twins Lottie and Lachlan are the smaller pair.
At this age, they are standoffish and don't come to the people.
The rest of the cows are completely 150% with the programme, however.
The farmer lady loads visitors up with treats - carrot slices and cow sweeties (pellets made of hay with molasses added) and they line up and politely take them from your hands.
You get sort of covered with cow slobber, and it's 100% worth it.
How about her magnificent horns!
We were warned to watch out for them - she never uses them in anger, but they are fairly wide-spanning and if she turns her head you can get bopped accidentally.
Closer-up of Wallace - isn't his blond streak cute!
Somewhat less cute, however, is Lottie, who has an unfortunate habit of sleeping in *exactly* the wrong place .... i.e. right behind her dad, just as he decides to ...
She was already a little bit poopy when we arrived, and the farmer was saying how she was going to need a bath after our tour ... the more so after this effort!
Lachlan is just getting to the point where he's starting to become curious about the treats that all the other cows seem so keen on
Coo selfie!!!!
Having filled the coobeastie up with their quota of treats, we headed on to visit
Urquhart Castle
If you read its history, interestingly it was destroyed by the people who lived there, to prevent it being taken and useful to the British.
We sat by the loch for a while. Apart from one annoying light plane buzzing overhead periodically, it was sooooooooo quiet and serene.
No, we did not see the monster.
Best we could come up with was a duck, who arrived a high speed and with a great deal of quacking, completely destroying the ambience.
Another easy home-cooked meal of British pork sausages, cauliflower in cheese sauce, fried kale and baby potatoes.
I hesitated in January, and regretted it, but this trip I did not hesitate to purchase myself a coobeastie!!
* * *
We were particularly excited to visit the Standing Stones of Craig Na Dun.
If you've read the books or watched the series, you'll know that this is the stone circle through which Claire falls back in time by 200 years.
It's marked on Google Maps and everything!
It was a good hour and a half drive from Inverness (that should have been our first clue, in the series it's about that long of a walk I think), and more than half an hour off the beaten track of the motorway heading south. We figured worth it to make the detour.
..... it's a farm. It's on someone's land.
The stones aren't even there!!!!! They put them up when they are filming!
(screen shot of the opening credits of the TV series, which we are re-watching, and hooting when they go somewhere that we know now!)
However, as the sign said, visitors are welcome to come onto the land. So we did.
This is the crest of the hill where they film the stones scenes. Very carefully avoiding filming the farm house and buildings, just behind!
It does have a lovely outlook over the loch down there. I believe it is called Dunalastair Water.
Some lovely evocative fog hanging around for decorative purposes.
After a good chortle at ourselves, we continued on, to spend a couple of nights in a tiny hamlet in the Lakes District, where we did absolutely nothing much at all, except for a 6km walk partway around Emmerdale Water, which is one of the lakes there.
It was coldish, apparently about 10C, but as usual, with no wind, it did not feel all that cold.
The AirBnB was very cute, but we couldn't get any of the heating downstairs working
Tomorrow it's back to France! - for the last portion of our trip.
