MONDAY   
EDINBURGH  TO  LOCH  NESS

Another morning, another breakfast room. Scrambled eggs, toast and tea again.
The trip today was going to take us from Edinburgh up to Inverness with a few stops along the way. The first was one a place we stopped on my first trip to the UK. It is Little Dunkeld. This is the River Tay which separates Little Dunkeld from Dunkeld.
This is the Little Dunkeld Church, built in 1798. It is allegedly where my great-grandfather Stephen Galloway Duly was baptized in 1879.
From Little Dunkeld we furthered north to Pitlochry. Every time I've been to Scotland I have been to this town. My sister wanted to visit the Heathergems shop.
It is also where they make Heathergems. What they do is take heather stems and clean them in this Tilghman Wheelabrator shot blast machine. The machine blasts iron shots as the barrel tumbles the heather, removing the bark.
Next they dye bundles of heather in a vacuum chamber. Every batch comes out slightly different. Then blocks are formed out of four bundles. Here are some of the dyed blocks.
The blocks are then cut into shapes and sanded. You can see some of them in the boxes. When there are imperfections they have to be filled and sanded by hand. That is what these two women are doing.
The last stage, happening in this room, is lacquering and fitting in mounts for jewelry or whatever else they are making.
I've always liked Pitlochry. It is a town of around 2500 people located about halfway (as the crow flies but not as the car drives) between Edinburgh and Inverness. It looks like a nice place to retire.
I had originally planned to travel up the A9 into Inverness and then down a bit to Urquhart Castle but the sat-nav, which I had named Fiona, had other ideas. In retrospect I'm glad she did. We travelled along Loch Laggan.
Dam. Damn!
Loch Lochy. Clever name, huh? It would be like having a Lake Lakey or Rivery River. But it was quite beautiful as the weather was clear that day.
Urquhart Castle on the shore of Loch Ness. Fifteen years earlier there were sheep in the grass. Now there is just grass.
*DUPLICATE PHOTO WARNING*

The trebuchet is still there. There was a film shown before we went out to see the castle. I will try to boil down the history and eventual stupid end of the castle.
To make a long story short, the Scottish people liked to fight a lot. If they weren't fighting the English they were fighting amongst themselves. Anyway, in the 17th century the owners of the castle, the Grants, sided with William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution. A force of Jacobites laid siege to the castle but while the garrison posted to defend the castle was not well armed they were well stocked with provisions and they outlasted the attackers. But when they eventually left the castle, so that it could not later be occupied by the Jacobites, they blew it up. Brilliant. Outlast a siege and then destroy the thing you were defending.
To help meet the challenge of feeding Urquhart, this room was converted into a corn-drying kiln in the 1500's. Yeah, I got that from a sign. You should be used to that by now. There was also the words of a traditional song called "Brochan Lom" or "Thin Porridge". It goes like this:

Give the lads bread with their porridge
Thin porridge, weak and thin,
thin porridge from oat husks.

I understand this was a big hit on Top of the Pops back in the day.
And nary a monster in sight. You know, I'm beginning to think this thing is all just a big hoax.
I wanted to take a cruise on Loch Ness, so when we were through at the castle we drove north a bit and just caught the 3:00 Jacobite Cruises boat. This is the 2:00 cruise.

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