Day's End

After Stirling Castle it was too late to see the Wallace Monument which is apparently an hour's walk from there, so I set out to see the Holy Rude churchyard and Cambuskenneth Abbey. The cemetery was pretty neat:

A Victorian monument to Scottish Covenanter Women.

A winged soul tombstone- they sure don't have these in Nebraska.

The Abbey was closed, which I expected, but it was also fenced and locked, which I didn't expect. I suppose I could have climbed the gate, but I was a bit tired at that point. So I took pictures from afar.

You can't tell, but it was raining. The Abby was beautiful and worth visiting, especially if you can come when it's open.

This is as close as I got to the Wallace monument. It's that speck in the distance.

So finally, tired and cold, I treated my self to a romantic dinner alone. It was one of those times I wish I was married. Thinking positively, though, if I was married I would probably not have been able to travel to Scotland.

So, all in all, I viewed the castle despite the invasion of the French; saw the Abbey albeit in the rain; and defiantly ate dinner. The train out of Stirling left at 8pm, and the W's very kindly picked me up in Inverness, so we all got home at 1am.

When winds frae off Ben Lomond blaw, An' bar the doors wi' drivin' snaw

While winds frae aff Ben-Lomond blaw,

An' bar the doors wi' driving snaw,

An' hing us owre the ingle,

I set me down to pass the time,

An' spin a verse or twa o' rhyme,

In hamely, westlin jingle.

-Robert Burns

 

I took the train to Inverness yesterday. Why, you ask? I had a train ticket to use, and pretty much all trains lead to Inverness. Even that is a 2 1/2 hour trip one-way. Train travel may be smarter in some aspects, but it's still very limiting. So I took the 8:01 out of Helmsdale and arrived in Inverness around 11:45(there were delays because it snowed) and stayed all day to take the 5:54 out of Inverness and get home at 8:30. You would hope that all this walking would toughen me up, but it still just wears me out.

 

I visited Tomnahurich Cemetery first, since the weather was iffy. It had snowed during the night and everything was wet and squishy. The cemetery is very large but not very old. There were lots of Victorian era Celtic style crosses. The grounds are formed around a high hill, and there are paths up to the top that would make for a very nice walk in the summer.

 

And then I went shopping. It's so hard to find anything that smacks of Scotland for a reasonable price, and I am trying to find presents for family at least. It's killing me! Inverness itself is not very large: it's smaller than Omaha, if that means anything to you. So I walked hither and yon and bought a few presents, and it snowed and blew and sleeted.

 

I stopped in the Cathedral of St. Andrew(be shocked: I would have gone in the Presbyterian Church, which is much older, but they keep it locked) which is a Victorian age building and what the Reformers would have called "popish." Pretty, but not quite the type of building I would want to worship in.

 

 

I was glad to rest and warm up a bit.

 

Then I said goodbye to the warm popish church and headed out towards the train station with a stop at the afore-mentioned Inverness Museum(mainly because you have to pay a pence to enter the "water closet" at the station, and I'm not one to spend money loosely) where you can see fascinating things like:

A great Auk egg.

And then I went home and went to bed.

Monuments

The Helmsdale monument commemorating the Highland Clearances, still remembered today as the "Cruel Clearances."

Road Trip

We started out as early as we possibly could, taking the A9 down to Inverness and west from there. However, about five minutes out we ran into a snag in our plans. An accident on the A9(Apparently known as the Road of Death) completely blocked traffic both ways. Now, there's no other road option for travel other than the A9. You literally cannot get anywhere unless you are on the A9, and since there was already a long line of traffic build up it was going to take hours to clear the accident. Our only option was to turn around and take a country road that would loop around and take us out farther up the road, and hope it would come out above the accident.

So we took this little one-lane road through the most beautiful backwoods hill country. It was amazingly bumpy and a lot of fun. The drivers here don't drive: they hurtle. Seriously. The cars are tiny, the roads are small and curvy, but people drive like there's no tomorrow. There are also a lot of one lane roads, so I can understand why there would be frequent accidents.

Anyway, the detour while long, was beautiful.  It's hard to take good pictures through a car window, though, so you'll just have to imagine it.

The object of our quest, Eilean Donan Castle on the western coast of Scotland. The roads from the east coast to the west coast are not what you would call direct, so with the detour the trip took us about 3 1/2 hours one way. Since this is the tourist off-season there aren't many castles open to visitors. Eilean is one of the few that remain open year-round. Unfortunately no photography was allowed inside.

The Marchioness wore Linen to Eilean Donan.

After lunch, the tour, and a quick stop at the gift shop, we drove to the Isle of Skye just to say we'd been there. And on the drive home we passed the famous Loch Ness and Urquhart Castle.

Anyone see Nessie? It was perfect weather for a sighting, and I'm perfectly convinced that Nessie is real.



Obviously, it was getting late by than. We ended the day by eating at a Asian buffet in Inverness, and we still had a two hour drive home after that.

Church Tradition: a Sunday Post

This past Sunday following the service up in Thurso Rev. MacL and Mr. W were discussing various interesting situations that come from having small congregations, especially in very old churches.

Understand that many of the churches up in the isolated north seem to be made up of under a dozen attendees, mostly elderly people(think 70+ years). So picture this: an old stone church building with a nice long center aisle with the minister standing in the pulpit up in the front, and the entire congregation sitting in the very back.

Now, most churchgoers are guilty of sitting in the very same pew week after week, and that's simply what these people were doing. For the last two hundred years their respective families had sat in those particular pews, which happened to be in the very back. And the remaining parishioners absolutely refused to sit anywhere else, even when the church size dwindled and the preacher was so far away from the congregation that his face was unrecognizable.

One minister tried to force his flock to the front by putting up a curtain right through the middle of the church, so the pulpit couldn't be seen from the back of the building. Come Sunday he couldn't see a single one of his parishioners- they were all behind the curtain. Another Reverend gave up and simply preached from the center pew. This just goes to show how hard it is to break tradition.

Note: the photos are from our quick stop at St. Magnus.

How the Sun Sets

Golspie Pier.

6pm

"Ingigerth is the most Beautiful of Women"

Yesterday we traveled to the Orkney Islands. Our sojourn began when we left the house at 7:45am and drove just under an hour to the northern point of Scotland, ending up at Gill's Bay. The ferry ride to St. Margaret's Hope on the Orkney mainland also took about an hour. Apparently the biggest industries of the Orkneys are tourism and oil. You can see the oil rigs as you drive along the Scottish coast. We appeared to be the only tourists on the ferry, which is understandable because it's off-season right now. Most of the passengers were men who work with the oil industry: they were a rather rough looking bunch. I was trying to listen to a nearby conversation to see if I could understand what the men were saying(I'm having trouble deciphering the accent here) and once I did I was sorry I had. I guess that's what I get for eavesdropping.

After reaching the mainland we drove another almost-hour to Skara Brae, and ancient village uncovered by a huge storm in 1850. I'm still a bit boggled by all the oldness available for viewing in Scotland, so when I say "ancient", think B.C. It's very cool that we can still see such places today.

This is me standing in the replica of Skara Brae. Standing in the fake fireplace. Searching for warmth.

This is me again celebrating American Independence(No taxation without representation!). As we walked down the the actual site one was supposed to travel back in time, and there were several markers to that effect. Only in our case we more like struggled painfully against the blustery wind through time, and if you're wondering why I have a giant mushroom on my head it's because it was very windy, wet, and chilly.

You're not allowed to actually walk in the houses, just on a path around them. The village was right on the coast.

When viewing such fascinating historical locations under such circumstances, one must ask, why on earth did they live here? Well, originally the coastline wasn't so close to the village; it's been eroded over time. Also, think of the environmental changes since the time of the flood: was it always really so cold here? Obviously the land was populated and good for farming. Perhaps it was attached to Scotland at one time as well, and not so isolated.

Then we stopped briefly at a circle of standing stones, the Ring of Brodgar.

This is me standing on a fallen stone. As with all the monuments we visited yesterday, almost nothing is known about these stones. Were they used for some horrible pagan practice, or were they for astronomical purposes, telling time and the like? Everywhere we went yesterday we saw the old "millions of years" mantra, as well as the "stupid caveman" idea. I know that the people living on Orkney thousands of years ago had just as much brain power as we do today, so I can easily believe them capable of better-than-primitive living and intellectual works. No doubt one reason archaeologists can't figure out what ancient artifacts are for is because they assume the people who made them were ignorant animals just out of the explosive soup puddle.

So were the stone pagan or practical? If pagan, then phooey on them. And if practical, than phooey on the evolutionists. I ran all the way around the circle and then we all squeezed back into the Green Haggis and went on to Maeshowe.

Pictures were not allowed inside Maeshowe, so the above is Miss W and I in the bathroom trying to warm up afterward. Maeshowe is in the middle of a field, so it made for a very windy wet walk there and back. The mound itself was very interesting. I think that was my first time in a burial chamber. The neat thing about Maeshowe are the Viking runes all over it from when some vikings wintered there way back when. One of my favorites is the title of this post, "Ingigerth is the most beautiful of women." You can read more of them on the website.

THEN, after hearing from our tour guide several fascinating ways that Vikings killed each other, we drove to Kirkwall to very quickly see:

St. Magnus Cathedral, one of only two remaining pre-Reformation cathedrals in Scotland. It was truly a beautiful old building.

This is me touching history. Seeing it is all very well, but touching it is more fun. Rich people used to be buried under their churches, and that's why all the old old "tombstones" are inside. Eventually they ran out of floor space and the smell just got to be too much, and thus the switch to outdoor burials.

By that point it was time to head back to the ferry for part one of our trip home, so I just got a glimpse of the churchyard. Short but sweet.

Now, I am not what one would call an accomplished seaman. Where I live it's a good ten hour's drive to any body of water resembling an ocean. I was on a ferry once, but that was for thirty minutes in a sheltered bay. The second largest flotation device I've been in was a canoe, and there weren't any waves in that case. So once we got into open water I began feeling a bit peaked, and wouldn't it be embarrassing to get sick from a ferry ride? The Miss W's loved it(Now we're going up! Now we're going down! Wheeee!) and thankfully I managed to keep my insides inside. It was probably thanks in part to not having much of a lunch, due to our rushing around.

I was very glad once we were on land again. Give me a wild ride in the Green Haggis any day over any kind of water travel. Finally, we got home at 9pm, had dinner and went to bed. It was a full and really very educational day.