Fall Scottish Trip, Part 3

Misty Mountains

We still hunt for fall or autumn colours, but in the far north and on the Isle of Skye in the Inner Hebrides fall most often shows up in rain puddles and brown heather and bracken. Still we search. 

Before we headed north we got a chance to play one of our favorite golf courses, Crail Balcomie about seven miles from St Andrews.

Anne is dressed for a cool windy day on Crail Balcomie GC.

The 14th green at Crail.

The day was lovely, but the course was well defended by the Scottish sea breezes. Weather service reports forecast winds of 30 mph with higher gusts and,

It was so windy I had to lay up on the relatively short par 3 16th. 

Good friend and Crail Head Pro, Graham Lennie, wished us luck as we headed out into the wind.

as they are more times than we like to admit, they were correct. It was a fun, strategic round of golf in a lovely location.

Crail Harbour

The roofs of Crail.

After getting blown around on the course for three and a half hours, we still had enough energy to wander one of the prettiest little harbours in Scotland, Crail.  

Our first stop on our trip to the north was a special two night stay—self-catering in a lighthouse keeper’s cottage at Buchan Ness Lighthouse. 

Our car sits in front of our cottage at the lighthouse.

As the Northern Lighthouse Board has automated the lighthouses, the staff cottages and outbuildings have become redundant (a good British term). Many are now being converted to apartments for long or short-term hire. 

Anne steps out of the kitchen onto the deck of our cottage.

Skerry Cottage was the Head Lighthouse Keeper's cottage.

The Buchan Ness light was completed in 1827 under the direction of Robert Stevenson (author Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather) and then converted to electric in 1978. The light was automated ten years later. 

A peat fire doesn't add a lot of warmth, but it is cheery on a stormy night.

Now, two cottages are available for rent. We stayed in the Skerry Cottage for two nights. 

From there it was a four and a half hour drive to the Cluanie Inn among the Five Sisters of Kintail (see last post). We took the north route along the Aberdeenshire and Morayshire coast with a stop in the small village of Portsoy. 

Portsoy was established in 1550 when the first harbour there was developed. A stone harbour was built in 1692 and a new harbour was completed further out in 1825 and had to be rebuilt in 1839 because of storm damage. 

Many of the buildings surrounding this complex date back to the early 1700s.  After a night in the Cluanie Inn, we ventured on to the Isle of Skye.

Between the Cluanie Inn and Skye we found plenty to grab our attention—mountains,

Small waterfalls were all around on a rainy day.

waterfalls, 

An unnamed burn near the Five Sisters.

castles, 

Eilean Donan Castle

and dramatic scenery, 

Houses built along a Highland loch.

A memorial to local lads lost in World War I.

The Isle of Skye is made up of four peninsulas (Sleat, Duirinish, Waternish, and Trotternish). Before checking in to our B&B in Portree (Trotternish), we wanted to explore Sleat in the south. 

On the recommendation of the owner of a leather shop in Armadale we drove a narrow and tortuous single-track loop road

Took its time getting out of the road and then stared us down.

from the east coast of the peninsula to the west and back. With no real villages (or services) on the route filled with blind hairpin turns and road summits where you can’t see what’s beneath your wheels until they land, this is not a road for the inexperienced UK driver.

Just an everyday hazard on most single-track roads in Scotland.

The loop, though, was absolutely filled with fall colours and grand views. Worth the effort, if you’re brave enough.

From the Sleat Peninsula it was a forty minute drive to our home base in Portree for four days, Duirinish B&B.

NEXT: Isle of Skye, Auto Adventures, and the Highlands, but that will have to wait until we are back home and recovered from jetlag. 

Fall Scottish Trip, Part 1

Mt Rainier as we fly out of PDX.

A rainy greeting in Crieff, Scotland.

Crieff and About. Our first stop on each trip to Scotland is the village of Crieff in the county of Perthshire. Besides being the home of our adopted family, the Cliffords, Crieff is central to many interesting attractions. In this post I’ll present a photo essay of some of the attractions that draw us back—waterfalls, mountains, forests, ancient sites—and end with a more complete description of one of the more unique of Perthshire’s tourist sites.

The Highland Hills around Crieff

The Falls of Dochart, the River Dochart in Killin. The river flows into Loch Tay and ends up as the western extension of Scotland’s longest river, the River Tay. 

The River Dochart drains from the eastern side of Ben Lui and the north side of Ben More.

The village of Killin is on both sides of the Bridge of Dochart built in 1760 and rebuild after a major flood in 1831. All these photos we taken from the bridge.

The Clan McNab Burial Ground is on an island (Innes Bhuidhe) in the middle of the river; there are graves there of nine clan chiefs.

Ben Lawers. This mountain is the highest in the southern part of the Highlands. The name in Gaelic means “Claw Mountain,” and it’s a Munro at 1214m (3983 feet)—a Munro is a Scottish mountain over 3000 feet tall. 

Bronze Age remains have been found at various locations on the mountain.

Sheep freely roam the lower slopes of the mountain.

Ben Lawers is now a National Nature Reserve with many species of protected flora and fauna. Most of the south side of the mountain has been owned by the National Trust for Scotland since 1950.

The Birks of Aberfeldy. The Birks is a circular 1.5 mile nature walk along the Moness River in the Moness Glen. The birks were made famous by Scottish national poet Robert Burns’s poem of the same name:

Bonnie Lassie, will ye go,

Will ye go, will ye go, 

Bonnie Lassie, will ye go

to the birks of Aberfeldy!

The Birks is a site of Special Scientific Interest for botanic plant life. 

The circular trail is most scenic when walked clockwise.

The path leads to Moness Falls which drops in three tiers a total of 380m--difficult to photograph, but lovely.

Croft Moraig (Mary’s Croft) Stone Circle. On A827 between Aberfeldy and Kenmare is a compact grouping of stones which is actually a complex double stone circle dated to around 2000BC. 

The site was officially excavated in 1965.

Robert Burns mentioned visitors exploring the stone circle over 200 years ago.

A least one survey lists the circle as one of the 20 best prehistoric sites in Scotland.

Cultybraggan Camp. This place has a reputation for being haunted. People say they get strange feelings about the place, they see figures in the shadows, faces looking through the broken panes of glass, ghostly figures about. It’s not surprising that Cultybraggan Camp has that reputation if you know its history.

The camp was built in 1941 to house 4000 Category “A” POWs. Named Camp 21, it was  a “Black Camp” holding the most committed and fanatical Nazi POWs. It was the camp that held the ringleaders of the Devizes Plot—a scheme to break 250,000 POWs out of camps and attack Britain from within.

After the war the camp was opened in 1949 as a training camp for Regular Army. Later, several of the 100 original Nissen huts (quonset huts) were removed to make room for a firing range. Then in the 1960s, the camp was made into an ROC (Royal Observation Corps) monitoring post. An underground Regional Government HQ bunker—Cold War survival bunker designed to be used by the Scottish Secretary of State—was added in 1990.

Finally, in 2004 Cultybrqggan was sold to the Comrie (the closest village) Development Trust and is now used for local small businesses, agricultural uses, and sports fields. There are plans to renovate the camp into a 4 Star hotel complex, but the ghosts have yet to give their approval.

Two photos of the Amulree area about 17 miles from Crieff.

Also 17 miles from Crieff, in a different direction, is St Fillans GC where we are members.

NEXT: We hunt for fall colors.