Vacation in Scotland

Hi Everyone, I thought you might like a summary of our trip to Scotland. It was only for one week and we decided we should have spent more time.

We rented a holiday home. We’ve done this before and really like it. The cost, even in the peak season, is about ½ the cost of a B&B and you can come and go as you please and you can cook your own food (which saves more money and doesn’t lead to over-stuffing yourself) and you can pack very light because there is usually a facility where you can do a load of laundry if you have to.

As you can see from these pictures, the place can be a bit breezy and the plumbing is a little primitive, but there is a lot of space to stretch your legs. It did rain while we were there and at that point we discovered that there were limited areas with a water-tight roof.

Actually, of course, this is one of the old castles that we visited. This one was in a town called ‘Huntly’ and was called ‘Huntly Castle’ for some reason. According to that flyer you see me reading, Scotland had even more in-fighting and religious warring than England did. Whenever you go to castle in the UK they are very proud of who stayed there other than the people who owned it. In this case the history is varied. Robert the Bruce stayed here when the area was called Strathbogie back in the early 1300’s after falling ill during part of his war for the independence of Scotland from England. Do not confuse Robert the Bruce with Mel Gibson! Mel Gibson played William Wallace in “Braveheart” and the guy who was always trying to make up his mind as to whether to go along with the revolution or not was Robert the Bruce. The Bruce had pretty much made up his mind by the time he stayed at Strathbogie. The guys who put him up later betrayed the cause of Scotland and were soundly defeated. So Robert gave the Lordship to the Gordon Family as a reward for helping him out and it stayed with them all the way into the 1600’s. Most of the surviving bits date from between 1560 and 1650. And a further succession of dignitaries stayed there, including Mary Queen of Scots before Queen Lizzie The First decided she was best kept under wraps back in England. The particular Gordon family that owned it was pretty well wiped out after the Protestants took over and they found themselves on the losing side. Fortunately nearly everything was defaced by the occupying protestant troops in the mid 1600’s so that Noreen and I weren’t overly corrupted by idolatry. One could perhaps argue that we have, in fact, been corrupted nonetheless; but it should comfort you to know that idolatry was not the cause thanks to armies of protestant fanatics in the 1630’s.

The troops were a little lax though, this crest did manage to survive. As you can see though, not entirely intact. Basically it shows the nice neat order of things. There is symbolism of God and the Heavenly host at the top, then followed by the pope’s symbol, then comes the symbols and heraldry for the King and Queen of Scotland and England, and at the bottom is the crest of the Earls of Huntly.

This was actually the castle we visited on Tuesday and we had been in Scotland since that previous Saturday. So I am committing a serious breach of holiday-account tradition by going out of order.

Oh and by the way, the woman in the picture is NOT Mom. We do not know who she is, nor do we know who the strange man is accompanying her…who isn’t Dad.

This is perhaps a more realistic picture of the holiday home in which we stayed. As you can see, it even came with a cook! And the dishwasher was able to take pictures as well otherwise the cook would have had to fulfil that function.

Dufftown was the place we were staying and we did manage to get there in time to catch some of their “Highland Games” festival on that Saturday. Unfortunately, we missed the tossing of the caber (which is the telephone pole-like object). But we did get to see the hammer throwing and the throwing of the weight. I can imagine that this would have been a very much more exciting spectator sport in the days when there was no net and everyone just stood around while these guys swung the 62lb weight around on the end of a 4ft chain. I suspect that, in fact, nearby spectators were necessary in those days because if the man swinging the weight around lost his grip too early, you would need someone standing right there to catch the weight and give it back to him for another try.

The highland games involved a great deal of highland dancing. There was a piper competition and a drum competition. So pictures of each of these events follow. There was also a mass pipe and drum band consisting of the combined strength of 5 bands from 5 nearby villages. The mass band marched around the pitch a couple of times before it was all over. So that picture follows too. ‘Highland Games’ is an excellent moniker. Otherwise they would have had to call it the ‘Dufftown 657^th Invitational Music and Dance Festival, Track Meet, and Tug of War Compleat with Beere Tent’…’Highland Games’ just seems to trip across the tongue a bit better somehow.

Highland Dancers.

And here is a young lad competing in the drumming competition. This is from the age of 16 and lower, and as far as Noreen and I could tell he was one of the best of the group!

Invasion of the Pipers!

Tug O’ War. The guys in the yellow shirts won in the end.

Of course, one would be entirely remiss on visiting Dufftown and this entire area of Scotland if the time spent did not involve a distillery or two (you kind of lose count after two for some reason). So we did. The local saying is: Rome was built on seven hills, but Dufftown was built on seven stills. And it’s actually true! There are seven stills still operational in Dufftown. There used to be nine but a couple of them are mothballed.

The dominant distillery is The Glenfiddich distillery as far as we tourists are concerned. They have the big tours and the extensive tourist information centre and all the items that you need to spend a lot of money there. But despite the marketing there are some things I like about Glenfiddich. First, it is still family owned and operated. Second, they have an almost superstitious attention to detail.

The recipe for making the stuff is really pretty simple. You convince barley to germinate and let it sprout for about 10 days on the malting floor so that the starches in the seed turn into sugar for the plant to grow. You then grind it up and mix it with really hot water in the ‘mash tuns’ to wash out all the sugar. You do this about three times, cool the wash down, add yeast, and put the sugar and grain laden wash into what is called a ‘Washback’ and you let it ferment. The reaction is vigorous, you can see the stuff roiling around and generating large amounts of carbon dioxide as the yeast causes fermentation. But the reaction also heats the mash up and eventually the yeast kills itself off with the heat that it generates. The results are then distilled.

But really there’s a lot more to it than that, because all the flavour and complexity in a whiskey comes from the second order effects. And these guys at Glenfiddich do take care to do as much as they can as it was originally done when the distillery was built in the 1870’s. So for example, when everyone else in the whiskey industry pays for a separate company to warehouse their whiskey in Scotland for the many years it takes to mature, these guys manage to warehouse it all on site. Also nearly everyone else has gone with stainless steel washbacks for the fermentation. But as you can see from this picture, Glenfiddich still uses wooden washbacks. We are standing near the top of this container, which is about 3 stories tall. I counted 24 of these things.

We took a tour of Arberlour too. Which is also a very fine whiskey when it’s been aged more than the standard 10 years. As you can see, our cook also seems to have a knack for the art of distilling whiskey. He seems very happy with his work. Maybe he is happy for some other reason. No doubt it was because of the excellent meal he had prepared earlier?? The two stills to the left are for the fully fermented stuff from the washback. This produces about a 20% alcohol mixture called the ‘low wines’ and these are fed into the still on the far right for the final result, which is about 75% alcohol. That is what they finally put in the barrels for at least 3 years. (It has to be in a barrel for at least 3 years, in Scotland, to be called Scotch whiskey by law.) The barrels are always wooden oak barrels and this is where the major component of flavour comes from. But oak is not a perfect seal and so they lose about 2% every year to evaporation, which they call the “angels’ share” in the trade. By the time they get ready to bottle the whiskey it has dropped to something like 60% alcohol. They add more water from the same spring that they used for the wash to get it down to about 40% and bottle it.

These are the stills at Arberlour and the picture below are the ones from Glenfiddich. You might notice, if you look closely, that they look different. This is one of the things that actually will differentiate one whiskey from another. The shape and how tall the neck of the still is. You might also notice that the Glenfiddich stills come in two different types. The only reason for that is that this is what John Grant had available to him when he constructed their first still house, so that is what they always use.

But it wasn’t all distilleries and whiskey nosings! Oh no. We went up along the coast as well and looked up some other castles and also, my own favourite, some ancient stones and stone circles. I am grateful Noreen tolerates this quirk of mine. In this case I must say that the Pics left behind much more interesting stones than the ancient people down here in England did. The Pics at least put some pictures on their stones! You can see here that they were anticipating the invention of the automobile and I have provided a comparision to the right of the stone, complete with lovely, if somewhat miffed, occupant.

The picture below is another one of these Scottish castles (Findlater Castle) but as you might be able to make out, this was built right on a crag out in the ocean! I am sure that it would have been a pretty darn drafty and cold place to live. All the water would have to have been taken from the roof as rain water I’m sure, or carted in. I guess that it rains so much in Scotland that there usually wouldn’t be a problem if you just collected all the rain run off. But in any event, having the North Sea as your neighbour on three sides cannot be a pleasant experience.

Last of all I wanted to include a picture as a reward for my father. Dad, assuming you made it this far, I have included this picture especially for your benefit. Something that I knew you would find both fascinating and enjoyable. Something that might demonstrate in unequivocal terms that your son does actually think about things that you might like on occasion and attempts to provide food for your soul.

A picture of Highland Cows. Basically they look like particularly hairy Texas long-horns to me. I am guessing that the horns were pretty much a necessity as weaponry against wolves as both the cows and the bulls seem to have them, though the females have shorter horns than these examples. Of course, there aren’t any wolves any more. In any event, I personally wouldn’t want to be caught anywhere near the business end of those cattle, I think I agree with the cook and would rather learn distilling.