5 posts tagged “scotland”
A decrepit castle on the shores of a sea-loch on the Ardnamurchan peninsula of the Scottish Highlands.
Ho-hum, flat-hunting.
So yesterday I was offline all day because I was at John Muir's birthplace. I bet you didn't know he was from Dunbar, Scotland! Well, he is. His family emigrated when he was 11. They had money.
I also didn't know that he got one eye poked out as a young man working in a factory. According to the wall text at the Birthplace, while he was convalescing he said, "If I ever get my eyesight back, I'll devote my life to nature!" He went on to do a whole lot of hiking and helped create the National Park system in the US, as well as the Sierra Club. He also partied with Theodore Roosevelt. They went camping together, just the two of them, for four days, while Roosevelt was president.
He was a crazy dude. He once strapped himself to a tree during a storm to feel what it felt like to be a tree in a storm. He took a trip around the world, visiting places like Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, South America, all in one go and not really in order. It seems like that would've taken ages in the early part of the 20th century. He also wrote a load of books; I can't tell if they were any good because the quotes on the wall were full of hyperbolic guff like "Then the clouds clear and the sun unleashes its incredible force on the countryside, clearing the moisture from every rock and warming even the smallest creature" (not an actual quote).
I was there because a friend of mine had put up an art piece on the coast outside of Dunbar: she silkscreened white-on-white flags and hung them between some rocks to be torn apart by the wind and tide. They quickly succumbed, though, to the groundskeeper of the nearby golf course, and for the winter they'll hang in the John Muir Birthplace.
Walking to the site where she'd hung the flags was fun because you have to walk along the edge of this golf course and avoid getting smacked by flying golf balls. The geology there is amazing: very pretty sandstone as well as some highly tilted slabs of rock that come up out of the sea at about a 60° angle.
Oh, right, the Internet. Hi, Internet!
I was off for three days in Ullapool, a wee fishing village in the Northwest of Scotland (the Highlands, too). What for? For talking about programming languages. They have lovely fjords there, except they're called sea-lochs. The ordinary word "firth" is Scots for "fjord" except that a "firth" (locals tell me) is the mouth of a river, whereas a sea-loch is just a lump of water cut in from the sea by glaciers. Outside our hostel, The Ceilidh Place, was a small grassy campground with caravans parked along the edge of the water, looking out to the very steep bank on the other side of the sea-loch. As I watched, a caravan would move, apparently without sound, from one end of the campground to the other. The water rippled in the background. The land across the way was tall and still; the air was wet and friendly.
I quite enjoyed the quiet and the pretty hills. If you're ever vacationing in Ullapool, you simply must stop in for a meal at The Ceilidh Place. They make great risotto and a fine full breakfast (that's beans, toast, an egg, a roasted half tomato, and a tattie scone).
On the way back to Edinburgh, we stopped at the splendid Black Isle Brewery, got the grand tour (10min.) and purchased a few litres of smacking good ale. Lager or 80-shilling are the standard drink in these parts, and you can't easily get the nice dark beers like they make in Bend, Oregon--unless, that is, you go to the Black Isle outside of Inverness. It's organic, £2 a bottle, and dead good.
A few hours later, we stopped for dinner at a pub in Pitlochry where I had a magnificent deep-fried camembert with port jelly, followed by a sub-standard roast-stuffed-peppers main. (For all those who said I'd never find vegetarian food in Scotland, I say, "Pah!" Why, the very pubs of Pitlochry are filled with the stuff!)
Near Ullapool is a dramatic little mountain, Stac Polly (Stac Pollaidh), 2000ft tall; if you don't think about the numbers, it cuts an impressive figure: steep rocks crown it, making for a sharp acceleration of slope. We were up and down in two or three hours, our chests expanded by the sea air and the long view, each of us left loving his fellow men, the more for the climb.
Then went down to the cars, set foot to pedal, forth on the crumbling streets.
