ICONIC IMAGES OF SCOTLAND (Part Two)

 

Highland Dancer, Portland Highland Games

     Castles, grand golf courses, quaint villages, Highland sheep and coos, and Her Royal Majesty are not the only iconic images of Scotland.  In Part Two I’ll explore a second set of pictures that represent Scotland, Scots, and the culture.  These are images as diverse as remnants of Scotland’s ancient and barbaric past, religious icons, the relics of a farming past, lighting up the seaways, and modern song and dance.  

Beginning at the beginning--the Scotland before there was a Scotland--Anne and I are fascinated with the ancient sites we find preserved by Scotland’s two cultural trusts: Historic Scotland and the National Trust for Scotland.  On the main island in the Orkney chain, several miles north of the Scottish mainland, we visited Skara Brae

Skara Brae Ancient Village, Orkney Islands

--the remains of a village abandoned almost 5000 years ago.  What’s left of the dwellings and their stone furnishings tells us how early Scottish agrarian settlers lived. The village was abandoned in about 3100 BC due to a combination of factors--life-style changes and climate change (getting colder).  On the island we also visited a stone circle, the Ring of Brodgar,

Ring of Brodgar

which still has 36 stones of the original 60.  This circle, one of many we’ve visited in Scotland, is the largest at 104 meter in diameter (you could play American football in the middle of it) and was built about 2500-2000 BC.  Along with the nearby Stennes Stones

Stennes Stones

(remnants of a smaller but taller circle) these stones served religious, ritualistic, astronomical, or all three purposes for the people who came after the Skara Brae dwellers.  On the west side of the island is another stone village, the Broch of Gurness

Anne at the Broch of Gurness Ancient Village

--this one was in use much later and was abandoned sometime before 200 BC. All over Scotland (indeed all over the British Isles) are ancient stones, usually standing stones, stone circles, or burial tombs such as Cairn Holy Chambered Cairn

Cairn Holy Chambered Burial Cairn

in Scotland’s south county of Dumfries.  More modern (in relative terms) are stone structures like the 16th Century Packhorse Bridge at Carrbridge

 in the Cairngorm National Park.  

More modern structures, mostly stone, are also iconic images of Scotland.  Churches and cathedrals, such as St Andrews Cathedral, are the most common pictures, but to us even more representative of Scotland and its people are the village or parish churches. Small villages the size of Comrie, Crieff, and Muthill, within six miles of one another each with one or more lovely churches. 

Comrie White Church and the River Earn

Parish Church in the Fog, Crieff, Perthshire

Muthill Church

 Others such as the parish church at Lake of Menteith 

(the only lake in Scotland--all the others are lochs) are picturesquely sited.  Even the town or city church can be photogenic if you find the right angle.  

St Mangus Church in Orkney’s largest city, Kirkwall, is an example.  

Another picture of Scotland which comes to mind is the isolated croft or bothy set into the Highland countryside.  

St Fillans Bothy on the edge of the Highlands

The north of Scotland is one of the most depopulated places in Europe--miles and miles of heath or moorland, rocks and scrub bush with nary a soul in sight.  

Two views of a Highland croft on the edge of Sma'Glen and Glen Almond, Perthshire.

Perhaps an empty or ruined barn or farm (croft) will be the only sign of habitation.  Lovely and dramatically desolate. 

Also desolate, but far more majestic, are the lighthouses of Scotland.  These are iconic images because of one of the most influential of all lighthouse architects, Robert Stevenson, grandfather of famed Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Kidnapped).  Still standing as operating sentinels today, the lighthouses at Buchan Ness (1827) near Aberdeen, 

the Mull of Galloway Lighthouse (1830) in the far southwest, 

and Corsewell Lighthouse (1818) at the top of the Mull of Galloway,

represent a Scottish influence felt around the seas.

Next for this description of iconic Scottish images is the lasting impression on the mind (and ears) made by the noted instrument of war, the Highland bagpipes, 

Craig the Piper plays outside Edinburgh Castle in the nation's capital.

and on the eyes the dancing they inspire.  Whether you love the bagpipes or hate them (I don’t think there is an in between), the image of the piper dressed in full regalia or 

Dancers at the Blackford Highland Games, Perthshire.

Highland dancers dressed in colorful tartans is perhaps the purest image of Scotland.

Next: Part Three, the last of Scotland’s trademark scenes.  Can you guess what they might be? 

The Orkney Trip

In 2009 we took the passenger ferry from John O’Groats to the southern tip of South Ronaldsay in the Orkney Islands.  We then got on a crowded bus for a day trip around four of the Orkney’s 70 plus islands.  We did see several of the main attractions of Orkney, but the bus passed many more with the driver’s comment, “And over there is...”

That one-day excursion was enough to convince us that we wanted to go back and “see” Orkney on our own schedule.  This trip we did just that.

We caught a different ferry, a car ferry, from Scrabster near Thurso on the Scottish mainland for our three day, three night tour of Orkney.  The one and a half hour transit of the Pentland Firth (part of the North Sea) was not an easy trip.  Large westerly swells kept the boat, big enough for 75 cars and several large lorries, rocking the whole way.  Anne, who fancies herself seaworthy, was bothered enough that we spent most of the trip on deck so she could get fresh air.  We docked at Stromness with almost the full day ahead of us.  Over the next two and a half days we managed to see most of the main attractions of Mainland Orkney (the largest and capital island) as well as some sites on other islands.  

The highlights of the tour were the ancient sites on Mainland.  Most fascinating was the 5000 year old village of Skara Brae on the west coast.  The village had been buried for about four thousand years until a strong storm washed away some of the cover in 1850.  Excavations revealed an entire village, including nine dwellings and stone furnishings, set into the ground.  Research revealed Skara Brae village had been continuously inhabited from about 3100 BC to 2500 BC. Tourists now walk above the in-ground dwellings and imagine how early agrarians lived.   

From Skara Brae on the west coast we drove in land to the Neolithic and Bronze Age ceremonial landscape of the Ring of Brodgar, a henge (mound and ditch) and stone circle made up of 36 (out of an original 60) stones as high as twelve feet.  The almost perfect circle 104 meters in diameter is between 4000 and 4500 years old and probably fulfilled a social and ceremonial function possibly associated with the commemoration of the dead. 

Not far from the Ring are the Stones of Stenness, a set of obviously shaped larger stones about 500 years older than the Ring.  At one point these were probably a part of a grand henge or ceremonial enclosure.  

Only a couple of miles by road led us to Maeshowe, the finest chambered tomb in northwest Europe and rivaling the better known Newgrange tomb in the Boyne Valley of Ireland.  The ten-meter long entrance passage (about three and a half foot tall) leads to a five-meter by five-meter chamber about 4.5 meters tall.  This is not a burial chamber for bodies, but rather with its three smaller side rooms a depository for the bones of the deceased.  The main chamber most likely was used also for ceremonial purposes when it was built about 5000 years ago.  

There were many other ancient sites that we visited as we toured around Orkney’s islands (Mainland, Lambs Holm, Burray, and South Ronaldsay), but one modern, if 200 years old can be called modern, site was a special treat. 

Highland Park Distillery, the most northerly of all the 105 whisky distilleries in Scotland, provided an exceptional tour for just the two of us.  Chris, our tour guide, took us through the malting process including drying the malted barley with both peat and coal fires, then to the brewing of the low wines in mash tuns made of Oregon pine, the double distilling into spirit, and finally the storing of the spirit for 12 years in oak casks before bottling it as Highland Park single-malt Scotch whisky.  We’ve been on many distillery tours, but this was one of the best both for its information and for the special dram we got at the end of the tour.

For our stay in Kirkwall, the capital of Orkney, we booked a pleasant B&B, Hildeval House, which had a grand view out to the Bay of Kirkwall and the Wide Firth.  Dinner one night at the Kirkwall Hotel was good pub grub, but we more enjoyed our two dinners  at a local Italian restaurant, Lucano.  We did find an interesting stop for lunch our first day on the islands.  Before walking along the edge of the North Sea at Birsay we followed some little red signs to the Birsay Bay Tearoom literally at the end of the road.

Delicious soup and sandwiches using local produce (some of it grown in the greenhouses next to the tearoom) and a fantastic location overlooking Birsay Bay made the little hut a destination.  

The trip to Orkney, the one we’d been planning for two years, was in most ways as good as we hoped and in some ways better than we had a right to expect.  We got really rained on hard only twice, once on the ten minute walk out to Maeshowe and the other on the first hole of the round we played at the Orkney GC.  The rest of the time the weather, which can be wild even by Scottish standards, was rather pleasant.  The one story we won’t tell in this entry is about the Tomb of the Eagle--you have to ask us about that story.      

Photos from the top: Scrabster Lighthouse, Mainland Orkney, Skara Brae (2), Ring of Brodgar (2), Stones of Stenness, Maeshowe Chambered Cairn, Highland Park Pot Stills, Tour Guide Chris, Birsay Bay Tearoom.