DAY 11
Thursday June
2nd 2016
Aberdeen to
Inverness Miles 183
Well even though the saying is ‘cast not a clout til’ May be
out’ and many people did just that yesterday, today was a very different story. ‘Now where did I put my clout, I need it again.’ This morning broke wild, windy and grey, but
fortunately not wet. Yesterday
temperatures reached 22 degrees, today the highest was 11 degrees!
Anyway, today (with my clout) I have seen angry seas, visited a
boyhood haunt, tried to claim my ancestors’ castle, seen the site of the last
battle between the Scots and the English and gone looking (briefly) for the
Loch Ness monster.
The journey north out of Aberdeen takes you into very different
countryside than that south of Aberdeen.
OK so I saw this in grey rather than sunshine and neat & tidy still
remained neat & tidy, but there is a definite difference in the look and
feel of the countryside. It seems more
like moorland right up the coast and across to around Banff. There are no colourful fields of crops. Indeed I only saw one field of oilseed rape
all day and that closer to Elgin. The fields were mainly sheep and the
occasional cattle, but nothing looked very productive. Interestingly, I have only seen two small
herds of Aberdeen Angus cattle while in this area. I imagined that I would have seen lots of
them. Perhaps they only have a few for
postcards and tourists.
My first stop was at Crudens Bay and the little harbor at Port
Errol. The sand here looked to be ‘good
digging sand’. There were three motor
homes looking as if they had been there all night. There is a public toilet here (getting rarer)
but though not locked they asked for a donation of 20p to be put into an
honesty box. Using the beach would be a
lot cheaper no doubt! The road out came
near to a huge gas plant, at St. Fergus.
I suppose for us to have easy access to energy in our homes you have to
pay the price of industrial ugliness somewhere.
Peterhead seemed quiet and I surmised that the fishing boats had
decided to stay home because of the weather.
However when I got to Fraserburgh, it was a very different story with
large boats going out and others coming in and rows and rows of fish sheds. Having set off at 7.30am with only a banana
for breakfast I decided to stop here and have a cooked breakfast and then I
could skip lunch. I had breakfast at
Angela’s café on the fish dock. Her
“quick” breakfast was a huge fry up (and I promise I only ate half of it) with
a mug of tea, all for £4! Fraserburgh there is also what looks to be
a great museum, the Scottish Lighthouses Museum. I regrettably did not feel that I had time to
look at it, but it was housed in a nice building so I am sure it is done well
inside. It is located near by the Fraserburgh
lighthouse and also a very large foghorn.
The sea
here looked very cold and uninviting with large waves, whipped up by the wind,
smashing onto the rocks.
As I
have already seen so far along this coast there is a well signposted tourist
coastal route. This took me on a windy
road to MacDuff where I at last began to see colour other than green or
grey. I dubbed one road the Yellow Gorse
road as for miles I seemed to almost drive through tunnels of prolific yellow
gorse. Despite the cold and windy
weather there were golfers out on the links at MacDuff. Rather them than me.
On the
opposite side of the Bay is the very small town of Banff. The harbor was fairly empty of boats apart
from a Sargo, which is a boat that I am currenty interested in. Comes from Finland and is happy in the North
Sea! As I left Banff there was the Banff
Springs Hotel, definitely not as large or attractive as its namesake in
Alberta. Another notable thing in
this area is the very prominent graveyards.
They all have large gravestones or monuments and seem more reminiscent
of those in Italy than in the UK.
As I
motored on towards Portsay the country became definitely softer in appearance
and the wind dropped. The little town of
Cullen proudly states that it is the ‘home of the skink’ and a local hotel won
the 2015 world championships. I daresay the ‘Skink World Championship' is a bit
like the baseball ‘World Series’ in the US.
It’s open to the world, but the world doesn’t turn up! Cullen skink is a thick soup made from
haddock (ideally Finan haddock) potatoes and onions. If it had been just a bit later and I had not
had my cooked breakfast, I would have stopped and had some, as today was perfect skink eating weather.
The
houses in the photo are at Port Knochie and are very typical of the area. The shape around the windows and doors are
striking (all in stone) and may be left plain or painted. Mostly you see the window and door stones painted white and the remainder left plain, but some are painted in different
colours. Indeed some have the inner brick
painted in a colour as well. One I saw
as I entered Buckie had the walls painted in lilac with the window and door stone
pained white. In some of the small
fishing villages I visited after Aberdeen, the houses were built side on to
each other in rows with just the end of the house facing the road. Quite common for this part of the world and
probably meaning that less of the house is open to the weather.
I
continue to look at all of the different lifeboats. The one in Buckie is a
large 17 meter Severn class boat. The
board outside the station indicated that it had not been out since May 17th
when it assisted a trawler with a broken engine and towed it into Burghead.
My next
stop was at Lossiemouth, with its major air force base flying intercept missions
against Russian aircraft that test out Britain’s defences by deliberately
flying into British air space.
After
Lossiemouth I then went to Burghead.
Burghead holds special memories for me as 49 years ago I attended an
Outward Bound School here for a month from mid January to mid February. I swear it was warmer then than it was
today. The OB experience was wonderful,
at least I thought so afterwards. They
would get us up at 5.00am and we had to have a one mile run before taking a very
cold shower. We also went climbing in
the mountains and sailing. I sailed a
dipping lug cutter from Burghead to Findhorn.
Regrettably
nothing remains of the school. I went to
the information center, set in a pretty. round, white painted stone building on a
lookout point. Here they had some photos
and records, but all for years either earlier or later than I was there. The only thing my memory was able to place
was the spot in the harbour where, on trying to get into a sail boat with
another boy, he pulled the bow line as I was getting on the stern, which moved away from me and I fell in
up to my waist. As it was February, I had
to go home and change, but then I was too late to sail. I also recall us going to Gordonstoun School
(where Prince Charles was). This was 5
miles away and we travelled there in an old army truck. Once there we had to jump in and pull
ourselves out of the pool 20 times, then swim 4 lengths backstroke, 4 lengths
breaststroke, 4 butterfly and then 4 crawl.
After getting out exhausted and drying off, we went out to find no
truck. ‘Sorry lads you have to run back’
said the instructor with a great deal of glee!
Actually I found that I really enjoyed the run.
From
Burghead I drove around the bay to Findhorm and made myself a cup of tea. This still has an ‘alternative living’
community dating back to the 1960s. The
road then led me on to Nairn and Inverness.
I noticed a sign for Cawdor Castle, which many of you will know that in
Shakespeare’s MacBeth he is described as Thane (or Earl) of Cawdor. There is no evidence at all that he ever had
anything to do with any castle in Cawdor and the one there now was built a few
centuries after he had died. I decided I needed more proof before I cold go in and "claim" it. It closed
at 5.00pm and as it was now 4.00pm I decided not to pay the £10 entrance fee,
so I took a sneaky picture of the house from over a hedge.
On
leaving Cawdor I saw a sign for Culloden, which is the site of the final battle
of the Jacobite uprising of 1746. The
Jacobites were routed, indeed slaughtered (1500 Jacobites killed to only 50
government troops) and this signaled the beginning of the Highland clearances
and the mass migration of many Scots.
The Site is run by the National Trust for Scotland and I discovered that
membership of the NT for Scotland gives you entrance privileges to NT for
England properties. However, the joining
fee for the two is considerably less - £60 in Scotland rather than £107 in England,
so I took out Scottish membership. Marilyn and I
will be in the UK frequently so it makes sense given the cost of entrance to
the various properties and the car parks.
Before
going to my accommodation I decided to take a trip a little way down Loch
Ness. It’s not widely known but Loch
Ness actually divides Scotland and it is possible, thanks to the Caledonian
Canal in Inverness, to take a boat from the Irish Sea in the south, right through Loch Ness
and out into the North Sea. Someday we
may hire a boat and do this trip
My
accommodation tonight is in another AirBnB booked house. A lovely older couple and I have a sink and
refrigerator in my room with tea, coffee and cereal, plus a private
bathroom; all for half the cost of a
Travel Lodge (indeed one third of the price they were charging here in
Inverness tonight).
Tomorrow
I drive up the Black Isle and along the coast to John O’Groats. I intend to stay 2 nights at Gills Bay and
take the ferry across to the Orkneys on Saturday to view the 4000 year old
settlements. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps
the sun will shine once more.
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