Heading into the Highlands

Saturday 1st October

We finished off our stay in Edinburgh with a fantastic night out where we saw beautiful Scottish dancing girls, heard the three Tenors of Scotland, a bagpipe player and two piano accordion players. They all put on a fantastic show for us. After our dessert, they piped in a haggis, then they addressed the haggis as is the custom reciting Robbie Burns Gaelic poem and then they toasted the haggis. After that we got to sample it -haggis on taties (potato mash and turnip mash). And would you believe it I actually love it! Jill wasn’t that keen however.

We set out early today and crossed the Firth of Forth and travelled on a narrow country road through Kirkcaldy and other interesting towns and saw the famous golf course at St Andrews where they say golf originated and where Hugh Baiocchi has played several times. We thought of you Hugh and Joan as the Dunhill Cup was in progress at the time and it was a very cold and wet day. Very bleak! This is also well known as a University town and is where Prince William went to University and met that young lady Kate. This is also the town where John Scott started the Presbyterian church, a Carmelite church governed by committee rather than an Episcopalian which is ruled by bishops. There are the ruins of a very important cathedral not far from the golf course which obviously was huge in its day and is now a place of pilgrimage for many people.

Then we headed north to Dundee after crossing Firth of Tay, passing through it and turning west we headed to Perth and passed the outskirts of the city of Perth. The weather closed in and we were bathed in Haag (mist!) eventually reaching Pitlochry where we stopped for morning tea and I had the best cup of tea I had ever tasted at Hettie’s Tearoom and where Jill left her handbag behind for about 10 minutes before retrieving it. After lunch we visited Blair Castle where the Duke of Athol (who actually lives in South Africa) reigns with the only private army in Europe which is over 600 years old. This is a “pretty” white castle surrounded by the most beautiful gardens, woods and farmland. They had Highland cows, hairy beasts with large horns grazing. Leaving Pitlochry we headed onto the moors – grasslands for grazing, then came to the Grampian mountains, not so much mountains at 3,000 feet as very high hills. They were gorgeous even though the heather had already died off with little or no colour left. This is where the Romans defeated the Pitts 2,000 years ago. The ‘haag’ sat on top of the hills and gave a fantastic outlook with thousands of streams flowing down the hills into trout filled rivers in the valleys.

Dalwhinnie was the next village, with the most isolated distillery in the world. There is no grain grown for miles but the water is brushed clean by the heather, making it possible to brew a drop of god’s own nectar. We finished up at Aviemore in the Cairngorms, a huge mountainous area. Tonight we had a lovely meal after being piped into the room by the bagpipes. We started with a haggis after the traditional toast and salute and finished with a true Scottish meal. We’re really in the Highlands now as opposed to the Lowlands yesterday. This is where the terrain is rather similar to that in Switzerland and where many battles were fought between the different clans.