From the Isle of Skye to mainland Scotland, we drove straight to the Loch Ness where we took a rainy walk in a forest along its famed shores. Our time near Inverness happened to coincide with a giant marathon! So we had to be mindful of detours and road closures on our way to and from a Disc Golf course in a cute park for Jake.
We spent the day in this park and then took another walk through the Islands that dot the northern edge of the Loch Ness just as the marathon party was winding down. We saw many good dogs.
Just down the road from Culloden are the Clava Cairns, a collection of Bronze Age burial mounds and standing stones.
Like Stonehenge and other ancient stone circles, the doorways of the cairns, their alignment, and some of the tallest standing stones line-up with the winter solstice sunset. This enchanting ancient burial park was surrounded by beautiful wooded countryside, contained several ancient gnarly trees, and most importantly was not overrun with other tourists. We meandered about the stones in peace.
I found a little time to paint and sketch while Jake was disc-golfing, which was a welcome change of pace and an intention I set for the trip. To at least do a little sketching and painting. I had fulfilled the goal partially on the roads in Ireland but we essentially never stopped moving in that entire first half of our tour. The fall colors were just starting to emerge in Scotland but the sun was noticeably lower in the sky than back home in New England. I could feel the locals bracing for the long dark winter which is surely even tougher in Europe, even with less snow, because of the even more dramatic lack of sunlight.
As we left Inverness and headed south, we passed through Cairngorms National Park where we hoped to see some Golden Eagles, but had to settle for the still impressively large common Buzzard. The Highland Folk Museum was a most impressive, expansive complex of relocated historical buildings from the last three centuries. Filled with more artifacts of daily life, farming, and wartime scarcity.
The best part of the museum however was the 18th century rural village. Consisting of mud and thatch huts, rural Scotland remained much the same in building and dress for hundreds of years until the 1800’s brought the means to transport more sophisticated building materials and people to the countryside.
If I remember correctly this village was modeled after the 1730’s, during The Little Ice Age when the highlands would have been cut off by snow from surrounding towns for much of the year. I was honestly shocked at the primitive construction and dress that seemed 400 years behind the rest of Europe. We talked for a while with the cast about Renaissance faires and climate change. Scotland is warmer now, and while it still gets snow, the young Actress who had our ear the longest had never experienced an Ice Storm.
Another big adventure near the Cairngorms was the Highland Wildlife Park. Thank goodness I built a lot of flex-time into this portion of the trip because I did not expect to happily spend most of the day at this zoo. With both a driving and walking component we spent hours watching Polar bears, bison, European Elk, Wolverines, Wildcats, and Monkeys. We even got so lucky as to be on the Polar bear observation deck during lunchtime, and watched a bear casually tear into and gulp down a whole stack of huge frozen salmon fillets. They were very fat bears.
For hiking, we had trouble finding the proper parking lot to An Lochan Uaine (The Green Loch), but made our own trailhead alongside some campervans on the side of some dirt backroad. The trail was more stunning than the popular loch on that perfectly crisp fall morning.
We also hiked Loch an Eilean which is a flat and close-to-parking loch with a derelict castle in the middle. To end our adventure we played a Disc Golf in Dunbar outside of Edinburg where I photographed many very special trees with big personalities. North America has Scotland beat when it comes to reforestation efforts, but the old trees that do remain in the old country have magic in them for sure.
