May 10 & 11: Rainy archaeology & the Jacobite Steam Train
We’d been waiting for the rainy weather to
catch up to us and on Sunday it did, coming down in buckets and activating the
waterfall behind our window. Two wet
cats jumped on our laps as soon as we came into the cosy loungeroom, tempting us to start up the fire and spend the day inside.
After spending far too long relaxing in the warmth and listening to the rain (Cara, the friendly white terrier licking at my legs and begging me to stay) we braved the wet and cold and decided to head down to Kilmartin Glen.
After spending far too long relaxing in the warmth and listening to the rain (Cara, the friendly white terrier licking at my legs and begging me to stay) we braved the wet and cold and decided to head down to Kilmartin Glen.
Kilmartin Glen is just further south of
Oban and we drove in torrential rain for most of the journey, stopping off at
Oban briefly to pick up tickets for our boat trip over to Mull. Due to the rain and winds on the ocean, there
was a high chance it would be cancelled, but we still haven’t heard about that
yet.
We were 10 minutes too late to lunch in the
café at the Archaeology Museum at Kilmartin, so we ‘picnicked’ in the warm car
before working our way around the museum.
Kilmartin Glen has one of the highest concentration of standing stones
and archaeological sites in Scotland, and we wanted to have a wander and check
some of them out. That ‘wander’ turned
into a ‘how close can we get without leaving the car, then running to the site
and running back’, but the rain let up after a while.
Most of this day's expedition was far too wet to capture on camera, but here's a snap of some standing stones we got from the safe, dry car. Note the sheep.
A pair of stones from the same ring, not so inundated with sheep.
When it did, we head out to a small henge
and met up with some cows and picked some blooming bluebells. We were about o head home when we remembered
that we had intended to visit the Dunadd Fort, so we drove up, intending to
‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ from the car. We got
there and realised it was the location of the Ossian’s foot or whatever it’s
called, where the King’s of Scotland placed their feet to connect with the
land, before they started using the Stone of Destiny instead.
We had to scramble up a slippery pile of
rocks and I slipped and banged my knee.
“Come on, you dag,” said Nick. “You just bruised your knee.” He ate his words when I took my stockings off
that evening and I had swelling larger than a hen’s egg on the side of my knee.
As we were going up, I joked, “If they’ve
taken the real stone and replaced it with a concrete one, I’m going to be
really mad!”
They had.
“They hadn’t removed it,” Nick said,
correcting me. “It’s just buried
underneath the replica stone, so you can’t be crowned king, which is what I
expected to happen when we got up here.”
I fully anticipated being DOUBLE KING of
Scotland, having sat on the faux Stone of Destiny and replica Dunadd foot-stone
(that’s not what it’s called).
Back at Fasnacloich, we had had soup for
dinner and I had a long bath reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which
I picked up from the charity shop on Skye.
The next day was a day I had been eagerly
anticipating even as I write this we’re experiencing the excitement associated
with RIDING THE JACOBITE STEAM TRAIN aka the Hogwarts Express. We’d booked our tickets the day they became
available for sale and I had been looking forward to it ever since. In a couple of the Harry Potter films, you
see the train going over the Glenfinnan Viaduct, and snaking its way through
the countryside. We were going to go
over the Glenfinnan Viaduct and snake our way through the countryside. Life changing.
Going over the Glenfinnan Viaduct to Hogwarts
We woke up early, fed and watered all of
the beasts, and head to Fort William to get our train. Luckily for us, the parking ticket machine
was out of order, so we got to keep a couple of quid, which we later spent on
raffle tickets. The first prize was whisky. The second and third prizes were smaller
bottles of whiskey. Scotland.
The train was chuffing away and sending
billows of smoke down the platform, which looked a little less spectacular than
Platform 9 ¾ but I think that was mostly due to the myriad of people taking
pictures. I joined them briefly and we
found our seats.
As chance would have it, we were seated
opposite the (probably only) other Australians onboard. Janelle and Tony were from Grafton and had
recently retired and decided to travel around the UK and Ireland, so we chatted
to them about that for a little bit, keeping an eager eye out the window at the
lochs, countryside and smoke that blew past our window.
When the train stopped at Glenfinnan they had a broom for you to pose with. We did, obviously.
The weather was pretty miserable at this
stage, which seemed to upset lots of the other tourists but I felt like it was
atmospheric. By the time we had almost
arrived at Mallaig, where the train terminates, the clouds started to clear and
the sun was a bit too bright when it streamed through the windows.
The train popped in and out of tunnels,
chuffing past lochs with the tiny little man-made islands in the middle of
them. “Did you know they used them for
defense?” asked Tony. “They’d have
elaborate underground tunnels from the mainland to the islands so that they
could get down and up and stay protected.”
Tony used to be a primary school teacher, and you could tell from the
way he talked.
At Mallaig, we waved goodbye to Janelle and Tony, because they mixed
us all up for the return journey and we wouldn’t be sitting next to them. We hadn’t planned a whole to lot to do at
Mallaig – “it’s about the JOURNEY,” I told Nicholas – so we popped into a café
there, before wandering around the fishing port – “I wish we could live on a
boat for a while,” I told Nicholas – grabbing some socks at the Lifeboat
charity shop and patting lots of dogs – “When we live on a boat in Scotland, we
can have a dog!” I told Nicholas.
Everyone in Mallaig was quite friendly, and many had come out of
their little shops and homes to wave us in as the train approached. I guess this’d be their big money spinner –
all the naïve tourists who were there for almost 2 hours over lunchtime for
most of the year.
The journey back hit us with lots of sun and a group of four
blonde-haired, tanned, middle-aged American women who were mostly
annoying. They had all ordered the
overpriced afternoon tea, but most of them didn’t eat it, and they just sat on
their Kindles, two of them not reading, but playing card games. They weren’t as chatty as Janelle and Tony,
but we managed to deduce that they hadn’t taken the journey to Mallaig on the
train. This made me wonder why they
weren’t more interested in what the train was doing. Most American tourists tend to baffle me.
Mallaig
The return journey from Mallaig
Back in Fort William, we had to pick up a few things for dinner and
called up to find our boat trip for the following day was cancelled because of
bad weather. Unsure of when the next
spot of dry sunshine would be, we rounded up the puppies and took them walking
on a short track that runs behind the house.
The several waterfalls were gushing more strongly than we thought, and
the puppies thought that jumping down into the stream for a drink would be a
good idea. Nicholas panicked and almost
jumped in after them, fearing that the violent stream of water would carry them
away. They weren’t – they were
fine. We found a cute little bridge
reminiscent of some kind of magical fairy bridge, and moss-covered stones. The wild bluebells were coming out in full
force, and it felt like a magical little way to walk your dog,
The cats hiding out in the greenhouse for us to come home
Bluebells are blooming!
Pippa and Cara
We stumbled upon a magical bridge
I ran a long bath while Nicholas got the fire going, and we cuddled
up with a pair of cats and Cara, the white Scottie dog. Nicholas was reading a weathered copy of
Quantum of Solace that had once cost 6 schillings and a thrupence, but cost him
50p at the charity shop. I read less
than a page of my book before I was asleep.
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