Category: Britain

I’m very pleased to report that I’ve now seen both of the castles used in Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail as of today! After we left Oban this morning from the hostel, we haded out into the highland farms on the much-lauded “Hairy Coo Safari.” Now before any of you read that the wrong way, bear in mind that “coo” is the Gaelic word for “cow” and you’ll realize that these are the famous Highland Hairy cattle, which to my eye looked like big woolly dogs with ugly huge noses. They seemed quite used to the attention we were providing, but Michael warned us not to get too close to them, as there was a very large bull close by to the heifers and death in the highlands really wasn’t something we were hoping to conclude with.

But yes, from there it was onto the small town of Doune, more specifically, Doune Castle. As we pulled up the driveway, my heart leapt in my throat and I was giddy with happiness. The walls, the sunlight behind it, the tall tower…I could almost see John Cleese standing on the ramparts shouting the oft-quoted insults at me or see the trojan rabbit being wheeled to the gate. To make things even better, the kind and wonderful staff provides coconuts for you if you wish, which I happily clattered together around the castle. The rest of my group probably thought I was nuts, but it didn’t matter…I was in full Python-mode. I must have photographed every room in that castle from every angle I could in preparations for watching the movie again as soon as I get home, and I cajoled my fellow travellers to photograph me in classic Python poses (charging down the steps like Sir Lancelot slaughtering the party-goers, for example, and lying on the floor where Sir Galahad is “serviced” by the ladies of Castle Anthrax). And of course, going up to the top ramparts of the castle and looking down, realizing that I was standing exactly where Cleese had stood decades earlier and looking down to where Graham Chapman, dear King Arthur, would be standing. Obsessed? No, of course not. Although they did have to honk at me to get out of the castle so that they could move on.

Next we went to the imposing William Wallace monument in the city of Stirling, where Wallace won the Battle of Stirling Bridge in the late 1200’s against an English force twice the size of his own, and also one of the battles in Braveheart. Up on the highest hill in the city, the grateful citizens built a 67 metre tall tower, made a huge statue of him, and placed his monstrous claymore (gaelic for “great sword;” original I know) within it. 246 steps up to the top gives a great view of the surrounding countryside and the nearby Stirling Castle (which unfortunately we didn’t have time to go to). I took the time to watch the informational video on Wallace, though, and Michael had told us to be back at the bus by 15:45…I ended up sprinting up the 246 stairs (which are about .75 metres across, making it tough to pass people!) snapping a few shots as quickly as possible, and racing back down the cliff again. Once again, I was the last one back, but I think people were at least getting used to me doing this sort of thing.

That definitely was one of the sad and unfortunate consequences of trying to fit so many different events into my trip to Scotland – not enough time to stay and look at everything I wanted to, like yesterday at Stalker Castle, or at Doune Castle, and again at the Monument. My Scottish Heritage pass would have gotten me into Stirling Castle for free too, but we had to get back to Edinburgh, so that was out too. It definitely made me wish that I had opted for the 7 day trip, if I had the time and money too! I definitely recommend the MacBackpackers though, and Michael as a great guide too. He really impressed me with his knowledge of Scottish history, great jokes, and uncanny knack for timing his history stories for exact locations so that we’d see his intended target just as he reached the climax of his tales. His company’s website is www.celticadventures.com and I would definitely recommend him to anyone!

Before too much longer though, we were back in Edinburgh, bidding farewell to everyone and catching trains, buses and planes either onto the next tour location or back home for some. I met some really great people on the trip (even though the snoring last night by my roommate Phil was awesome to behold and left us all wanting to smother him in his sleep!) and I’m really glad I took a break from having to micromanage everything for the past 3 days and just was able to relax and take pictures.

Well, it’s time for me to make my way back to Liverpool now, but I’m definitely going to miss Scotland and I know I’ll be back. I have a mountain to climb, a Loch to swim in, and an island to tour, and that’s the very minimum. Next time I’m in Great Britain, I’ll work my way from the top down instead!

Thankfully, the weather today has been excellent! Internet access (for free at least, for a cheap fellow like me) is scarce in this part of the world, and I’ve been scraping by as I go. However, it’s been a whirlwind of a trip, which is sadly unfortunate. I gave myself about two weeks to see England, but only three days to see Scotland! Now that the second day has just finished up now, I find myself wishing I had given myself a lot longer to see all the sights we’re whirling past.

After I posted last, the weather continued to turn for the worst. Pouring rain constantly, the bus getting stuck in ruts at times on tiny one-lane roads. At one point, we had to pass by a city bus out in the wilderness and we were stuck side by side for ten minutes, trying not to run each other off the road. The passengers in each stared across the 3 millimetre gap with some nervousness to the other bus’s occupants, and it was a rather tense moment because we could go neither forward or back. Obviously we did finally make it out though, but that gives you a hint as to what the road conditions were like. For most of yesterday and today as well on the Western coasts, we’ve been on one-lane roads.

We saw ancient stone cairns out above Dunkeld, a thousand years older than Stonehenge and aligned with the winter solstice sunrise. It heartened me that I got to see something truly ancient on my trip, since I had missed out on Stonehenge and will have to save that for another day. We squelched about in the muck in the fields…Scotland has a free-passage law that says that trespassing is non-existent and people can literally go anywhere as long as they don’t damage the land. These cairns, called the Clava Cairns, were covered in markings from ancient tribes and served mostly as burial or cremation tombs.

After making a quick stop by the Battlefield of Culloden, where Bonnie Prince Charlie almost met his end in an ill-fated battle in 1745 (a battle considered by many highlanders to be a pinnacle battle for independence from England), we arrived in the famous Loch Ness region. I didn’t realize that the lake was so huge, being 24 miles long and 750 metres deep…deep enough, said Michael, to fit every member of the human race inside and not even reach the top. However, it was still pouring quite a bit, and scaggy too, so we couldn’t see too far down the loch (not that we’d be able to see 24 miles to the end anyway!) and many people just stayed on the bus too. Determined as I was to at least partially experience the loch, I waded out into it. It was cold, very cold. I quickly waded back out again…Michael told us later that most of the time, weather permitting, people leap out into the loch and swim around for awhile. Maybe next year.

We then made the last leg of the first day’s journey up to Inverness, the “Capitol of the Highlands”…visitors to the city from other islands around the mainland must be happy to see a city that has two lane roads and more than one pub! It was tiny, compared with the Edinburgh lodging, but the team of us amused ourselves for the evening by going to a Thai restaurant that Michael recommended (and he came with us too so it must have been good, we figured) called Hootananny’s where we had some great Thai food (rather an odd combination of locale and food, I thought!) and just chilled and listened to…surprise surprise, a didgeridoo. Who would have thought?

Today we started off by heading to the Island of Skye, renown for its beauty and mountain ranges. This is definitely one area, viewed as the bus rumbled down the mountains towards it and the mountains reaching into the clouds and stretching far into the distance, that needs to be climbed by me, and sometime soon. Apparently the Macbackpackers group that I’m with now does 3-4 day trips into Skye, just for climbing, but I’m on more or less a whirlwind tour of Scotland and we unfortunately can’t stay very long at any one location. We dropped off some people at Skye and picked up some other hikers, had a snack at a pub and took some photos, and we were off again back into the Great Britain mainland. (Michael was quick to point out that Skye wasn’t part of “Great Britain” but part of Scotland solely.

Next the bus was off to the nearby Eilean Donan castle, which many Americans know because of its conspicuous role in being the backdrop for a movie a couple people have seen, a little clip called “Braveheart” – yes, it’s the backdrop that Mel Gibson and his pals are trooping out from, and there were some pictures of the movie set in there as well. It’s actually independently owned by the MaCrae family and not by Scotland historians so it was a few pounds to get in, but it was beautifully done and had an amusing kitchen with amazingly realistic wax figures of members of the household and the food that would have been eaten after its 1932 restoration. I know it’s silly to think about it from the Hollywood position, but it was cool to walk across the bridge and think “Mel Gibson was here twenty years ago and walked right here.” I think it holds the unofficial honor as the most photographed castle in Scotland too, and I can believe it, too. I certainly added my own camera to the countless others that have surrounded it.

We made a quick stop by the Glen Coe area and the simply incredible mountain range surrounding the road there. It’s a little bit past Ben Nevis, the highest point in the entire Great Britain range (at 1300 metres, compared to my Snowden 1085 metre hike) and it’s a ring of cliffs standing around 1,200 metres tall, all around the road and covered in trees and heather and waterfalls. I felt very, very small standing there surrounded by the cliffs, with the tiny bus look like a dot of white against them as I hiked a ways away from it. It’s greener here than the Rocky Mountains, but a lot taller and more majestic than the Appalachian Range too. I really enjoyed seeing it, and it’s another one of those “if only I had more time” sort of things for me…I want to climb Ben Nevis now, too.

For the last stop before we reached our 2nd night lodgings of Oban, we stopped by a little castle, out of the way, near the little town of Appin. It sits on a tiny island off the shore. However, this castle is unusual because it goes by two names. It’s castle Stalker to some, but to millions around the world, it’s more famous as “Castle ARRGGHHhhhh” from Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail. Even though we could only spend 10 minutes there or so, and we were 200 metres away from it, I was tended to leap the fence (testing those pro-trespassing laws) and prostrate obsequiously before it. For a longtime Monty Python fan, seeing the very place where Arthur and Lancelot were refused entry, for the second time, and looking across the river and seeing the hill where the peasants and soldiers (almost all of them extras from Appin; what a lucky job!) assembled was a dream come true. But once again…a lightning trip this has to be and so we were back on the bus in a few minutes. Michael honked the horn at me; I looked up and everyone was back on the bus and watching me and laughing, I had been leaning on the fence staring at ARRGGHHhhh as everyone else left. I breathed a heavy sigh and rejoined the group, staring back at the castle longingly. Someday, someday…

Soon we were in Oban, and after grabbing some mince pies with some travel colleagues, we decided to see the local sights: McCaig’s Tower, which was a charitable job by the McCaig clan chieftain for 3 out-of-work stonemasons to build a tower in the dead of winter, inspired by the Roman Coliseum. It was never finished though, so it became a garden for the city. After snapping some shots of that, we moved on to the spooky, abandoned ruin of Dunollie Castle which has the honourable distinction of not having any guardrails, security, or any annoying things like that. It’s an ancient castle, almost destroyed now, and covered in vines and ivy and holes. We climbed around in it a bit, but as it was beginning to get dark and the stairs were both slippery and steep, we decided we should leave before it got too much darker.

The last day comes up soon, and it’s now half past midnight! Stirling tomorrow!

The tour bus is currently speeding up through the highland Grampian Mountains right now, and since we’ve all got a bit of whiskey packed into us now (no one more than myself) I thought I’d take some time to tear my eyes off the beautiful rocky vistas around us and type out a quick memo on what we’ve already done so far today.

The bus arrived at about 9:00 to pick us up and we headed north immediately, across the Forth of Firth (I love that name) and into the Dunkeld region on the lower highlands, where we took a stop to tour the Hermitage forest, which houses the tallest tree in all of Britain and a beautiful waterfall with an overlook from it. The trees here are very old and mossy and the stones are almost covered in the thick green carpet. Our guide and bus driver for the next 3 days, Michael, said that Dunkeld forest was made by Scottish botanists who would take seeds from other countries, load them into a cannon and then fire them into the mountains just to see what would take root. There were beautiful purple rhododendrons everywhere which were certainly not originally native.

We then came to the next stop on the trip: Edradour, Scotland’s smallest distillery in the mountains of Pitlochry, where they make fabulously expensive whiskey with a team of only three men and they’ve been doing that since the distillery was founded in 1825. This place makes the whiskeys back in the States look like Fleischmann’s vodka; bottles of this stuff (aged between ten to twenty-five years in casks) cost anywhere between £39 and £69 – now double that and you have the price in American dollars. So as we’ve been driving north towards Inverness (stopping to grab lunch in the town of Pitlochry) it was a pleasant surprise that Michael got us a little gift at the distillery. Michael is talking to us about the history of the Scottish clans in the highland mountains, he tells us that there was Callies between the clans, meetings of people, and likens that to the 25 of us on the bus, and he whips out a big jug of 10 year old whiskey and says just like as the clans did, so we must all touch the bottle to our lips and drink (to show that we’ve not poisoned it to kill off the other clans). So suddenly the bus is filled with laughter and noise as we’re hoisting this big bottle around and swigging from it and of course, I didn’t mean to drink three swallows, but the bus went over a big bump and it just went down my throat unintentionally!

So we’re continuing to head north; we should be at Loch Ness within another hour or two. Michael’s put on Scottish music (everything from new age to jigs to bagpipes) through the loudspeakers, and the CD is skipping pleasantly as we hit potholes in the old highway. Shaping up to be quite nice so far!

The Scottish Borders region is pretty, but without a mode of reliable transportation to get you from one part of the county to another, there’s unfortunately not very much to see in each individual town. I’ve been in Melrose now since about noon, and after finding the youth hostel I was booked at discovered that they didn’t even take receptions until 16:00. Thankfully an assistant let me toss my heavy pack in the main lobby, leaving me with my small laptop case.

As I was crossing the road into Melrose Abbey (considered to be the most lovely of all the abbeys in the area) it started to rain. I had my silly-looking poncho though so it wasn’t too much of a problem. I spent the next couple hours taking the audio tour of the ancient abbey, founded by Cisternin monks about 900 years ago. The abbey has been destroyed and rebuilt several times over the centuries, and is now only a small fraction of its former size, and what’s left has been mostly reduced to ruin. However, there’s still some amazing stonework in the walls and high gothic windows, and the graveyard surrounding it contains what is believed to be the heart of the famous king Robert the Bruce (yes, just the heart, not the rest of him).

Interestingly, to continue my very limited “research” into clan Douglas, I discovered that James Douglas (or the Black Douglas as the English called him) was actually one of Robert the Bruce’s most trusted friends and captains, and when the king passed away, he asked his friend Douglas to carry his heart into Jerusalem so that it could be with the Scottish soldiers in the crusades like he always wanted to be. James complied but was killed in Spain on his way there, and the heart was returned to Melrose Abbey where it was laid to rest somewhere in the abbey for several more centuries until being rediscovered a few decades ago and reburied (properly) in the main graveyard. Even though they can’t be sure whether the heart they discovered was Robert the Bruce’s, many are leaning in that direction. Regardless, it’s nice that someone distantly and most likely in my family was part of Scottish history.

After the abbey though, the rain was coming down even harder and I didn’t want to bike all the way to Kelso or Selkirk, and the buses are all messed up because it’s the bank holiday. I made myself some pasta at the hostel and then went for a walk (which I’m still on right now at this moment) up in the tall flower-covered hills above the town of Melrose, looking down upon it. It was nice to relax for awhile and not have to worry about an itinerary for a couple hours, and just watch the sleepy little village below me and the trees sway around the abbey. I’ll probably be heading back now (I’m still in the foothills right now, writing this) and turn in early, so I can get to Edinburgh earlier to see the sights there.

I’ve had a comparatively relaxing day in Newcastle today, thanks to my overseas American friend Larisa taking such good care of me. I did have a bit of a sleep-deprived comedy this morning as I staggered into my suite’s bathroom in the hotel and in my sleepiness (or just plain silliness) couldn’t figure out how to get the shower to work. They’re really quite different than American showers – there are two main handles, one to control the flow of the water, and one to control the temperature of the water (in Celsius though, so I can’t really read it anyway!) – but then on this one there was a few other buttons and a red cord hanging next to me too. So I’m disrobed, in the bathtub, hot water pouring next to me, and I’m frantically trying to figure out how to get the shower to work before my 11:45 bus to Hadrian’s Wall leaves, prodding the buttons, yanking on the cord, when all of a sudden I hear a sharp rapping at the main door. Fearing that I’ve forgotten to check out at a certain time, I ask what the problem is. I hear a female voice from the other side saying, “you pulled the cord sir; do you need assistance?” I remember I’m in the handicapped room and smack my forehead. See, at the Embassie Hostel, there was a cord like that next to the shower stall, but that turned the shower on and off, so that’s the only experience I had regarding these strange ceiling cords. I call out apologies, and ask for her assistance with helping me get this shower to work too. So a moment later, she sees the door swing open to reveal a disheveled and bewildered American standing in a towel. I’m glad I didn’t have my contacts or glasses so I couldn’t see her expression, but I could tell that she was about my age. I was quite embarrassed when she showed me that the plug needed to be pulled out instead of pushed in.

I finally made it out the hotel and was racing down the avenue to find the bus stop that would take me to Hexham, where I could transfer to Newcastle. I spent the next few hours in the company of a delightful (and free!) guide named David, an older gentleman who was quite exuberant in his description of the various Roman ruins we were seeing on our journey. A funny note here: according to the pamphlet that David gave me, there were familial groups of raiders, (called Rievers by the locales) who in the middle ages would use the relative lawlessness of the Northern regions to pillage and steal from the British estates the area. The pamphlet had a list of family names that the Rievers went by and sure enough: there was Douglas, my great-grandmother’s family name. I told David that my ancestral family was from the Melrose/Selkirk region of Scotland and he agreed with me – there was a good chance that at some point in history, my family had been bloodthirsty raiders. Rather unexpected. The wall itself was of course visually unspectacular, being only 3-4 feet tall in most points, but as we would crest hills and see it stretching off into the distance through the fields, surrounded by sheep, it was easy to imagine how it might have looked in the year 122 AD, as a Roman soldier on duty might have seen it walking across the wall and seeing the symbol of his mighty empire. I felt very sad that I didn’t have time to get off the bus and see the various ruins of baths, fortresses, and castles we were speeding past, but in the interest of time there were such sacrifices to be made.

However, I realised that a new problem would be having Larisa find me! She was expecting me to be arriving at about 18:00 by bus, but instead I was here at 15:45 by train. So I spent the next hour or so wandering pathetically about the streets of Newcastle with luggage in hand (beginning to detect a trend here?) and looking at street signs. Speaking of which, that’s one thing I really miss from home: clearly organised and labeled street signs. Any American knows that if he’s at a junction of streets, he can just look towards any corner and he’ll see a sign post with clearly labeled signs showing the options. However, in England, street names are sometimes (and only sometimes, unfortunately) put on buildings themselves or in tiny hiding spots at intersections. Which makes a poor confused tourist even more confused, even though it was first in Salisbury that I realized this wasn’t Kansas anymore (to use an American cinematography euphemism).

I finally made my wanderings over to Newcastle University partially by luck and partially by more helpful citizens taking pity on me, and begged my way into Robinson Library on campus, where my Wisconsin student ID card got me in where a nice librarian let me use the computers to desperately check Facebook for Larisa’s address.

I had finally made my way to her Terrace when I found that I had no way of getting into the building to let her know that I was there, but a resident found me sitting on the doorstep and (for security purposes) led me through the halls of the residence dorm to her room. She wasn’t there, but I left her a message and as I was making my way back down to wait in the lobby, I heard “Zach!” behind me and she rushed from a kitchen. Apparently she had heard my voice, and certainly wasn’t expecting me for another few hours!

I received a wonderful greeting from her of lots of food and ginger beer (which isn’t actually beer) which I gratefully accepted since brekkers hadn’t been in my schedule that morning. We were soon joined by her friend Caroline, and the three of us had stir fry for dinner (with tea, of course) and went to see “Magicians” at the local cinema. It was funny to listen to all of the American-accented movie advertisements, and to try to put myself from the perspective of a British youth, growing up listening to American accents all the time in culture. I tried to think of what it would be like to listen to British accents all of the time, and then realised that I’d only be listening to Geico Insurance and Revlon Makeup commercials.

After the movie, Larisa and I stopped by her favourite local pub by her place and grabbed a pint of Newcastle’s own “Newcastle Brown,” a very tasty ale while we chatted about home and traveling. She’s already offered the kindness of walking me to the train station to start me on my journey to Scotland tomorrow. I can’t wait to scout out my family’s home country and try some Haggis!