We had to come back in a half hour to find out where we'd be staying. We popped over to a grocery. We got some cookies and I got some Idris Ginger Beer. I guess at 1 proof this is the most alcoholic beverage I really enjoy. I needed more film so we walked around Inverness. There's a Marks and Spencer. It is much like our department stores with a grocery section. Of course, they also have the usual departments like cosmetics. Just like in the United States, they are decorated with pictures of good-looking women wearing gawd-awful makeup, which is just the opposite message as they are trying to send.
Well, we got our reservation and headed for Ullapool with a diversion to the vitrified fort at Knockfarrel.
I am not sure I would know what I am seeing isn't natural. Except for a large piece of rock in the ground, it doesn't appear to be special. In fact, nobody is really sure how this rock was melted and fused. It is thought that wooden pilings and ramparts of the fort, during an attack, was set on fire and burned so fiercely that the very rock walls melted. The ferocity of the attack must have been truly impressive. The ancient sites author suggests that instead it might have been an intentional process of the fort builders.
This fort required a good deal of back-road driving. The instructions in the book on how to find the place were ambiguous. Also the road numbers have changed since the book was written. We did finally find the fort. From where we parked, it was about a quarter-mile walk, but steep, to the top of the hill. Again, it looked flat on top with a dent. In addition, it was clear a lot of sheep had been at the top recently. A whole lot! Walking where sheep hadn't been was a real problem, but walking where they had been was worse.
After about a half-hour we returned to the car and continued on to Ullapool and our B&B.
I think that more about sheep might be in order to tell. As we have gotten to the west coast they seem to be just about everywhere beside and in the road. I guess a sheep is a pretty good investment. You put them in a field and they pretty much feed themselves. Your main concern is getting them back at the end of the day. Sheep don't return home when it rains--it is unclear that their 2-1/2-watt brains even know the difference when it starts to rain--so I doubt that they return when it gets dark and mealtime is all day long, so they don't return for meals. I think the sheep are marked in some way so that their owners know them. Most seem to have a big red spray-paint mark on their backs, which must be for identification. Unless maybe it is so the lamb's wool won't be stolen.
One difference one notes in sheep here: in the United States we tend to dock sheep's tails. It was explained to me that they are in a very poor place and tend to get filthy and smelly. So farmers tie rubber bands around the tails and they die and fall off. Sheep naturally have wide, fat tails that go from halfway to 3/4-way to the ground. Here all the sheep have tails. It looks a little strange at first.
The sheep seem all over the place blocking the roads. Occasionally you see cows doing the same. We saw one truck that had been surrounded by six or eight bulls trotting down the road. Luckily they were going in the opposite direction. You ever see a full-size bull drooling and watching your car out of the corner of his eye as he trots past? Let me tell you, it is some sight.
Actually the animal that blocks the road most is woman/man. (I guess that's the non-sexist way of saying it.) The roads are narrow. The good roads have a wide lane going in each direction. That's like superhighway over here. Then there are narrow two-lane and one-lane roads. The one-lane roads have occasional widenings called 'passing places.' You find yourself facing another car head-on and one of you backs up to a passing place. It's not fun.
But with even the two-lane roads there are problems in that people work on the roads. That blocks off a lane so that the highway becomes one-lane with no passing places. How is this handled? They put a traffic light at each end of the one-lane stretch. There are portable traffic lights for this purpose. Each way has a red light most of the time. If you get a green light, the other side will have red long enough so that cars in your direction can all get through. It takes quite a bit of time and I'd guess that if your car breaks down on the one-lane stretch, you have serious problems.
One thing that speeds traffic up is the cycle of all traffic lights, not just the portables. They go green, yellow, red, red/yellow. The last tells you when the light is about to turn green so you can be ready to go.
Plaids are a little more common than I first claimed, but still not all that common. You do occasionally see men on the street in kilts, but it is only occasionally. A cartoon in Cawdor Castle showed 'A Tourist's View of Life in the Highlands.' Everyone was in plaid, living in a castle. The children were dancing a fling. There were three or four Scottish terriers. All the men were in kilts. I would have liked to get a picture, but it was covered in glass and would not have come out well.
(I am picking up here a number of small comments that should have come earlier.)
One little thing I found strange. You go through these peaceful idyllic Scottish villages and the ones which have cinemas seem mostly to be showing LETHAL WEAPON.
Evelyn suggested I repeat this comment in the log. Last night we were in Drumnadrochit; tonight we are in Ullapool. My comment was that you have wasted you vacation if you haven't stayed at least one place that people at work won't be able to pronounce. It goes with my longtime comment that you have wasted your vacation if you didn't come back exhausted. I have to collect 'You've wasted your vacation if...' statements; Evelyn is collecting 'I didn't come 5000 miles to...' statements (as in 'I didn't come 5000 miles to eat at a Pizza Hut.').
We tell ourselves that religion is perfectly rational. Then whenever an archaeologist finds something he/she does not understand, that seems useless and irrational, we attribute it to religious ritual. The early Scots apparently had carved balls out of stone. Nobody is sure why, but of course what is assumed? They were used for religious ritual. No logic need apply to it. That says something about what we really think about religion.
September 8 (6:58 AM): Well, we continued on to Ullapool. It took about 45 minutes and three trips to the Tourist Information Centre, but we got our next reservations made. Ullapool is as predominantly white as London was brown. It is really a fishing village that has made tourism one of its industries. The guidebook says it was built to catch and process herring late in the 18th Century. Then the herring and town dried up. After being a ghost town for a while, it revived fishing. It has a lovely view of the water and an interesting view of the fishing boats.
Before dinner we drove to Lochinver, another fishing village. Mostly we went for the scenery which no doubt will not seem all that interesting in the pictures. A lot of the loch pictures will undoubtedly seem very similar. They are too beautiful not to photograph. The weather is dramatic. There are usually mountains nearby with their tops shrouded in clouds. In any hour you will generally have a period of bright sunshine and a period of rain, often both at the same time. A rainbow is rare at home, but here you see two or three a day. Evelyn and I both commented that Scotland looks geologically a lot like Norway. However, as Evelyn adds, no glaciers.
I guess there is more distinction made in roads than I realized. The map distinguishes between a single-lane road where you can usually see the next widening so you can pass oncoming cars, and one where you are more likely to have to back up. That is the kind of road we tried to take from Lochinver back to Ullapool. As someone in my family used to say, 'It was no pitnic.' After about four miles, it was clear we would not be to the B&B by the time we said we would, so we turned around. We still took better than an hour getting to Ullapool.
We dropped off some bags at the B&B so they'd know we were coming, then went for fish and chips. An ad that they had up said, 'Everybody's favourite: British Fish and Chips' and showed three burly sports figures, their eyes gleaming, as they looked at big plates of fish and chips. It struck me as odd since trying to export fish and chips to the United States turned out such a cropper. I guess if you are used to burgers, fish and chips with a good malt vinegar is an acquired taste. Ev claimed you do still get fish and chips in the United States. Any fishery serves fried fish and French fries. I would claim that has some of the ingredients of fish and chips, but that it is a very different dish.
The Fish: It must be a piece eight or nine inches long, batter-dipped, not breaded. It is fried enough to make the batter very crispy, but the fish should still have sufficient texture to break into rounded slices 1/8' to 1/4' thick.
The Fries: not golden brown, but white and dark brown. Just a little surface grease from the frying.
The Salt: Put on the fries.
The Vinegar: A rich, tart malt vinegar. Once the fries are salted, it is sprinkled indiscriminately over both.
If possible, a good ginger beer on the side. Good stuff.
After dinner back to the room for more writing and early bed.
I was up early enough to write a little in my log and to mysteriously lose a pen. It seems to have disappeared totally without trace into the bedclothes. Extensive search did not turn it up.
At breakfast we talked to a vacationing English couple from Manchester. They were somewhat interested in my politics. As an odd note, his politics were very similar to mine. We both believe that the nuclear arms race is probably better than any feasible alternative, an uncommon viewpoint these days.
Today the driving is mostly around craggy cliffs and lochs. We saw someone hastily patching a smashed windshield in a falling-rock zone.
Beside the road was a waterfall at Measach. These are no great tourist attraction, but they are worth a few pictures. Evelyn was at first afraid to cross a ramshackle bridge over the falls that I had no problem with. From this I conclude that Evelyn trusts herself but not the tools she uses. In the Scott Monument, she had little problem climbing up narrow stairs without a handhold but she was afraid to trust a bridge. I was just the other way around; I trust the tools but lack the self-confidence. Oh, well.
What followed was a fair amount of narrow-road driving. We hit some of our heaviest rain while I was driving, but this was one of those days when it poured rain when it wasn't bright and sunny. We saw another World War I memorial. We must have seen a dozen so far and not one World War II as far as I remember.
Midafternoon we arrived at two brochs near Glenelg. A broch is an ancient structure found only in Scotland. What is a broch?
Take a paper cup. Put it upside down on a table. Tear out the bottom. Roll up a piece of paper, put it in the hole of the top of the cup, and let it unroll to a cylinder with the same diameter as the hole in the cup. Now cut off the paper protruding over the cup. You are left with two walls. One is cylindrical (the paper); one is a truncated cone (the cup). A broch is a two-walled structure shaped like the paper model but the walls are made of shaped, piled stones without mortar and with no apparent holes through the stone. These two are about forty feet high, though there are smaller ones. They are big enough that you can fit stairways between the walls. Also, some stones are longer and are part of both walls. One source says that brochs were used as forts and people lived in the center part; another says that people actually lived inside, between the walls. The latter is usually agreed on, but whether cattle or people lived in the center was unclear. |
