Tag: #scotland

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Aberdeen, Scotland and surrounding area

Aberdeen I think can be an interesting town if you decide to stay there a couple days and pick out the certain places you want to visit. I was not so much interested in touring inside the city as I was going there to catch a ferry to the Shetland Islands. I find the countryside around there to be very interesting and much more stimulating than a city.

The much revered EdwardVII, son of Queen Victoria
This local church is obviously active so that it has sufficient funds to be repaired and maintained.
And this is what the church is promoting. This is Scotland!
Of course you can find Thai restaurants in most every city in Scotland. I suspect this one is run by type people but I was not able to check since it was not open when I was there.
Now you know the rest of the story
This was a tourist oriented organic farm where people can buy ice cream and other products.
The ice cream was delicious. You will see the bubble sitting areas in the background. It was pretty cold. A bubble is good protection.
A lot of thought went into these flavors
They have different bins at this tourist farm for recycling and this shows you how to recycle the pizza box. Yes, they do serve pizza here.
This was a good Chinese break from Scotland food though the flavors should’ve been much better.
This is a Palestinian demonstration pushing Barclays bank to divest from Israel.
Do you know a better use of a coffin? I hope this doesn’t signify what happens if you drink there.
These of course are tourist related trinkets possibly for the visitors south of the Scottish border.
He is very revered in Scotland.
Here he is behind a young girl who was a very good Piper
You can guess what they serve here
It looks as though everyone has had their say
This was kind of a nice pub just outside of Aberdeen across the street from my hotel
Beautiful countryside
Across the street from where I was dog sitting
I tried a new site called TrustedHousesitters and this was my first six day stay taking care of Trixie. She was a very easy dog to take care of and it was a beautiful area in the countryside. The arrangement with the website is you stay in someone’s house at no charge to you and they don’t pay you but it’s good for people who are traveling and need a break from the very expensive Scotland hotels and want to just relax in nice places and have some animals to take care of temporarily
The seals come here to hang out and watch the tourists. You have to pay for the parking space but it’s a nice area to take a walk and possibly go for a swim in the summertime. I can’t remember if swimming here is permitted. They definitely don’t want you going close to the seals and disturbing them
The birds also hang out here as you could see from the white coloring on the top of the rocks
Some of the birds and fauna in the area
The seagulls are kind of bored since they’re almost no tourists they can steal food from
This looks like a very pious, religious objective
But it’s on the side of a cannon
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Thurso to Moray, Scotland

from the northernmost part of the mainland UK traveling down southeast toward Aberdeen you find whiskey distilleries and very interesting small towns with very friendly people to chat with.

This was brought on for the breakfast and introduced to me as “brown sauce”. I suspect this is a standard in England as well as Scotland. It has some mild “brown” dull sweet flavor, not really something I would want for breakfast.
The statue is memorializing war dead
Let me know if you see this fellow waiting on you in a restaurant
This is a nice walking street
This Thai restaurant was not open which was too bad. I would have loved to have a break from fish and chips
This fellow is forever waiting for a train at this station
This is a pretty good tasting brew, and Irish cider
This fish and chips was really excellent but I didn’t eat all of the peas since I don’t really like them. But I know they are healthy so I did what I could.
This memorializes the people who were dispossessed of their land by the Sutherlands who turned this area into huge sheep farms, forcing people into areas and jobs in the peripheries. Those who couldn’t make it in those new jobs, feed their families or find some way to survive Got on boats and went to the US, Canada, Australia and maybe one or two other places. This was the great era of emmigration which gave great people and talent to other countries.
The River Helmsdale
my hotel lobby was very comfortable.
This was my hotel which was a little difficult to understand. I couldn’t find an entrance to the breakfast area so I left for the train station to catch the train to my next stop. Normally you would expect someone to be around to help you navigate the building but there was nobody.
Here is the river Helmsdale again
Scotland is just filled with stone walls
The Helmsdale graveyard
Yes, they still have these telephone booths
A local beach looks very nice but it was too cold to take a dip
I didn’t know Shakespeare was such a great fisherman
In other Scotland breakfast and you will notice my soy sauce. That little triangle above the sausage looked so oily I decided not to eat it.
The sausage sandwich was actually pretty good
A very tasty beer
On the bus to Thurso the driver, for some reason, decided to take the side roads and we got behind some farmers taking their cows to a different field.
You’re supposed to imagine what happens if you don’t drink coffee
This is a hand written genealogy tree explaining the kings and queens of Scotland and of England up until the 1700s.
This was the best deep fried fish in a town called Huntley. You can easily find the restaurant since it is the highest rated one.
The restaurant uses real slate for the placemat
A narrow road which is very narrow and possibly slippery in the winter leads down to this little town with just a few inhabitants but it is a seemingly nice place to just relax and hang out as a Harbour venue
At the eastern end of the harbor there is a small coffee shop which you will see below. The lady who runs the place will give you some good background information and chat with you while you drink your coffee.
Many of the farms just seem to go on forever
Some old abandoned equipment on the edge of the farm
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Chivas -Strathisla distillery in Huntley, Scotland

I stayed in a guest house owned by a local well-known professional boxer who also traveled around the world as an internationally recognized boxing referee and umpire. He showed me his trophies numbering more than 50, very impressive.

Breakfast in the morning was Scottish minimalist
an interesting house next to the distillery
The distillery where Chivas’s headquarters are but where one of the oldest distilleries in Scotland still creates their own single malt which is not made in large of quantities to sell out of the general area.
Strathisla is translated as ‘narrow river’
These buildings here represent their very famous distillery, very old and a shape which determines how the whiskey is distilled. The equipment is bent sideways to accommodate the roof structure
Very limited production
The Royal salute series was originally created to celebrate the coronation of Elizabeth II
We were just visitors so we did not need to clock in
You can see how the equipment is created to fit inside the building which is very old
The Chivas brothers bought this distillery because they needed the water and the distilling capacity
This is where we did our tasting
From the coronation of Elizabeth II to Charles
As you probably know the Chivas series are all blended whiskeys. This one will be an alternative purchase to a very small car
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Visiting Huntley Castle: Local Brews and Historic Sites

Huntley Castle has mostly been destroyed but there are some things left that are of interest. And the town has some very friendly people at the pubs so I recommend going there, getting something to eat, maybe having a drink and talking with people.

This was the breakfast which of course was in need of some soy sauce
I highly recommend this beer, Tennant
A local chocolate ice cream they sell at the castle. Very tasty
The Gordon’s were the last grand owners of the castle and their name is permanently fixed on the front, carved in stone
This cute little cottage hotel looked abandoned but maybe it was just closed for the off-season
The fish was OK but I’m not really a fan of deep fried fish, the beans were typical England beans, nothing special, and the onion rings tasted like there was no onion inside which was the case with all of the onion rings I had on my trip. Don’t eat the onion rings but there are places where you can get some good fish.
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sailing to the outer Hebrides – Scotland

the journey to the outer Hebrides is a short ferry ride depending upon where you board. You have to make sure the weather is OK, coming back the trip was canceled due to very high winds so I had to take the ship the next day. Finding accommodations can be a little tricky since they are limited and if you’re going at the peak tourist season Things could get pretty booked up.

This was a sign on the ferry
There is a display of the navigation chart in the public area so you can see exactly what’s around, all the details including the depth and how the captain is steering the vessel. Off to the right you will see a blue spot with lettering above it. It says “NATO submarine” and the purple writing above explains that it is a submarine exercise area.
Meeting People
click “continue reading” to see the rest of the discussion
It was getting into the winter type weather so the occasional rain would produce rainbows and some of them seem to be right at my feet. It was quite an experience.
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Orkneys – Skara Brae and Pict remains

the Orkneys have so many of these Pict structural remains going back as far as 6,000 years ago. It’s a great place to go around by car. Bus travel is a little bit difficult since there aren’t many buses and they are not running frequently. So plan your trip well in advance.

This is the home of the earl or Duke or Lord or marquee or whatever who discovered these Pict ruins.
Elizabeth, the queen mother, visited this home at least one time and even signed the guest book as you can see here
This is one of the ancient bird houses where the shit is used for fertilizer, the eggs and the birds themselves are food. And these birds help keep the insects away from the crops.
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Inverness Scotland and Culloden, the Jacobites

Inverness is where you go to see Loch Ness and Culloden’s Moor where the Jacobites (believers that the son of James II from his second marriage should have inherited throne) led by Bonnie Prince Charlie challenged the brother of the king of England, George II, To a battle in a soggy and marshy terrain against modern Canon warfare on the English side. The story I didn’t know was that the followers of Charlie had almost marched into London and had a some chance of dethroning George. But they decided to go back to Scotland and on the way had some very successful battles. They almost won the crown but George’s brother a mass far superior weaponry.

jacobite is from the Latin form of the name James, Jacobus. It refers to the followers of the royal family from the second marriage of James II.

The first time I ever had haggis. It was actually pretty delicious even each time I tried after this
This marks where the Jacobites Gathered for the battle. On the other side there is a corresponding red flag for the English
This is the Moor. but it is filled with sunken, marshy areas where, evidently, the Scottish troops had problems advancing

what Family tree shows is that when there were no more heirs through the first marriage of James II of England (Scottish by ancestry and the king of Scotland), they decided to grab George from Hanover who didn’t speak English. What I didn’t know until I saw this tree is that he was a blood descendent of James I And was not just picked from some obscure claim. George was the beginning of the house of Hanover which continues to this day.

An important cultural site
I never tried this but I’m not really excited about doing so
The Inverness ocean Inlet which connects to Loch Ness. After seeing the map and the area itself I can imagine that when the ocean level here was very high some large fish could swim into the loch and grow and then become an extremely large fish or mammal or whatever to be viewed 400 years ago as a “monster”. So the story is not far-fetched and I believe there is some truth to it but I suspect it was just a very big fish or mammal which couldn’t get out of the loch. The other sightings were probably just large fish. In the late 1800s it’s pretty clear that everybody else’s sightings were just made up stories.

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Orkney islands the second time

the first visit to the Orkneys I didn’t have a car which made it extremely difficult to go and see what I wanted to see so I went back to the mainland, rented a car and went by ferry to the Shetlands and then back down to the Orkney before returning to the mainland.

Some old archaeological fines go back 6000 years. People lived up here at that time and this is one of the large settlements uncovered
The purpose of this was to provide a nesting place for birds. The bird poop would be used for fertilizer, the eggs and the birds themselves for food and of course the birds would eat the insects around the farm . Below you see the bird poop and droppings from the birds nests above
There is a very large house here owned by a very rich family from long ago and when the ocean came smashing on the shore from a storm it exposed parts of this pict village. So the owner of the land did the excavation and now it is quite a tourist attraction
Inside the big house there was a photo of the Duke of Windsor, the one that became Edward VIII and also this signed visitor book by the Queen Mother, the mother of Elizabeth
This ring of standing stones has been here for more than 4000 thousand years
And now it’s time to get back to the mainland on a very nice and relaxing ferry complete with Shop, bar and restaurant
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Alness – Dornoch Firth Scotland

this is one of the very beautiful areas in the Highlands

Carbisdale castle. You need a reservation to get through the gate and to view the castle
Late October was the perfect time in this area. The fall colors were beautiful
A very big funny looking mushroom
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Harris and Lewis – the outer Hebrides

one of the famous products from the island of Harris which is actually a continuation of Lewis, is Harris Tweed. I bought a Harris Tweed jacket in 1985 and I thought “Harris” was the name of the company produced the jacket. But it refers to handwoven wool tweed produced on the island of Harris and no other place in the world. Many products will import the tweed from Harris, create a product and ship all over the world and even back to Scotland. But the tweed needs to be certified by the association of Harris Tweed producers and therefore gets the standardized label “Harris Tweed”. Asking around I found there are probably over 200 people dedicated to weaving this product by hand.

Lobster or crab traps
This church is pretty much at the southernmost part of Harris
Ancient tablets
Many gravestones were done in sandstone and so they become unable after 100 years
This is just one abandoned building
A golf course overlooking a beautiful beach
One of the Stone Towers left by the Picts