Category: Miscellaneous

It was raining heavily yesterday as we hiked up the hill in the middle of town to visit Stirling Castle.

It sits high on a hill in the middle of the city and has been an important location for many pivotal events in Scottish history. The wind and rain battered down up there yesterday.

The castle is an impressive structure with a rich history and beautiful views, but much of what is on display is reconstructed (much in the last few years) and these efforts continue today.

Our guidebook says the place lacks a soul and I agree. I’m more partial to well-presented ruins like Urquhart than approximations of what may have been like Stirling.

It got sunnier in the afternoon as you can see, and we were finally able to dry off. If I look tired above it’s because I am! As usual it’s been a very active vacation and it’s catching up to both of us 🙂

But it’s been wonderful! And we’ll certainly remember some of what we’ve seen for ever. Right now we’re about to leave for the airport, but a few days after arriving back I’ll put up one more post to show off a few pics I couldn’t add via my phone and leave my final comments.

No Blog yesterday; we spent ~8 hours traveling from Orkney all the way down to a town called Kingussie. The trip included the return ferry, which made me about 80% green, as well as cyclonic winds and rain as we traveled down the eastern highlands coast.

After all this our B&B room was insanely large and comfy – easily the biggest room we’ve ever stayed in. We slept well last night!

Today we headed to our final destination of this trip: Stirling. Today (after the drive) we just strolled around lazily; tomorrow we’ll visit the famous castle.

I bought perhaps too many stamps so I’ve been on a postcard bender! Watch your mailboxes 🙂

Orkney is home to many Neolithic sites, and we visited several of them yesterday. These included two stone circles and three ancient ‘villages’ and almost all of them were older than the pyramids.

These two shots are of the Ring of Brodgar, built on a low hill between two lochs. It’s about 100 m in diameter and over 4000 years old. I’ve been to other stone circles in England and this one is right up there with the best of them in terms of majesty and mystery.

Only a short drive down the road are the older Stones of Stenness. The ring is much smaller but the stones are taller and feature graffiti that in one case was written by a Viking!

Skara Brae is a famous preserved Neolithic village that was occupied between 2500 and 3200 years ago. Partially sunken into the ground, the homes include stone furniture and many included personnel effects which suggests to some it was abandoned in haste (Pompeii comparisons have been made).

I particularly enjoyed the mysterious objects found in the ruins: intricately carved circular stones that are presumed to have had religious use. They look almost alien, and to me it’s curious such a relatively small ‘village’ contained so many.

Later in the day we visited another old village, the Broch Of Gurness:

Bigger but perhaps not as famous as Skara Brae, it’s an unusual experience to wander the streets of this place and imagine what life was like for the inhabitants thousands of years ago. These locations – and Orkney is riddled with them – fill my mind with questions that will never be answered…

Orkney has a whole second appeal to WW2 buffs that I’d be interested in exploring, alas today we return to the mainland. It’s slightly tricky to get here, but if you’re ever visiting Scotland I would suggest you include Orkney in your itinerary.