Episode 21

Episode 21
Whilst in the Wick area we also visited the old castle Sindair Girnigoe that stands right on the shore of a wide bay north of the town. It was once the seat of the Earl of Sindair. At present it’s a crumbling ruin with enough still standing to get a good idea of how it must have looked in times gone by. It was begun in the 14th century with a defensive wall around the land side and a sea gate. Over the centuries it was added to and modified and ended up by being quite large; I could find no date for when it was abandoned. Some scaffolding has been put up around some parts and I read that there is some plan to stabilize it and perhaps restore some parts, though it doesn’t appear as if much has been done at this stage. In fact it looks as if some parts may well have fallen into the sea. The rough winter sea and storms are its worst enemy:
One of the earls of Sindair got it into his head that his son wanted to murder him so he imprisoned the son in the dungeon and let him starve to death; charming family!
Off shore from Wick we could see 2 oil platforms one much larger than the other. Near the larger one we also saw two wind turbines. I wonder how the hell you would anchor them to the sea floor as they looked just the same as their land based counterparts.
So we finally come to John O’groats on the north-eastern tip of the Scottish mainland, its not the most northerly, that distinction belongs to Dunnet Head a few miles to the west on a big peninsula. David and I were here back in 1971 and its grown a bit since then. Back then there was only the old hotel with its rounded towers looking like a pretend castle and a couple of farm houses and sheds. Now that hotel is closed up and decaying rapidly but there are number of tourist shops that have sprung up, a post office and general store, a new hotel and a couple of reasonably priced bed and breakfast places, even a couple of new houses, its beginning to look like a big village. Down on the beach there is a small boat harbour from which there is a ferry to the Orkney Islands in the summer.
All this though is a good mile or so from the real point where the lighthouse stands. There has been a lighthouse here for around 200 years but its only be automated since 1993. It overlooks the Pentland Firth a very hazardous stretch of water. Just down the coast a short way from the lighthouse there are some sea stacks just off the cliffs. These cliffs, like so many around Scotland are alive with birds in summer when Puffins, guillemots, awks, and kittiwakes are nesting on them.
Drove out to Dunnet Head, the most northerly point where there is another lighthouse standing atop the cliffs there. It was built by Robert Stevenson, the grandfather of author Robert Louis Stevenson in 1831 and was automated in 1989. The glass in front of the light is 105 metres above the sea yet it has been broken several times by stones tossed up by the waves. From a lookout above the lighthouse we got a great view out of the islands and the whole of this northern area as it is relatively flat, with gently rolling hills.
Came to the town of Thurso, this town, like Wick and the village of Reay are all old Norse villages dating from around the 9th century, the names have become corrupted from the original Norse over the ensuing centuries. This town has some rather nice old Victorian buildings and is a pleasant place to stroll around for a while. A few nice churches are dotted about the town. Its only small but seems to be growing despite the fact that the nuclear power station at Dunreay just a few miles away was decommissioned in 1994. There is some restoration work being done there now we saw when we passed.
Near the old power station there are a few big wind turbines that I expect supply electricity to some of the area. I also noticed that on the roof of a new large supermarket in Wick there were 5 small wind generators all whizzing like mad. I did read or hear somewhere not long ago that these large ones cause the death of a great many sea eagles, an already highly endangered species.
Went looking for some burial cairns that were marked on the map but didn’t find them, nothing unusual in that and they all look much the same so I don’t suppose I missed a lot, its just annoying with they aren’t well signposted.
Came across a herd of deer, don’t know if they were red deer, roe deer or fellow deer, but I don’t thing they were red deer. They had the big light coloured patch of their backsides, apart from that light faun patch they are a similar colour to the dead bracken they were amongst. They were mostly females with some fawns; one of them was still suckling her fawn even though it was nearly as big as she was. There was just one stag amongst them so they must have been his harem though I thought the rut would be over by now. They just stood there and watched us watching them; perhaps if we’d got out of the car they might have gone off in fright but they didn’t seem nervous. The males antlers weren’t very big. A short way further on we saw just two stags on a hillside, they both had larger antlers than the fellow with the females, one of these chaps antlers were very large but they don’t get the big ‘racks’ like the reindeer do.
Apart from the usual hazards of sheep and cows on the road we also had ducks. Some were mallards, but they were all domestic ones. They didn’t want to move out of the road just stood directly in front of the car and wouldn’t move. We finally got around them then pulled off to one side and called them and they waddled over to us. On these very narrow roads it’s a wonder they haven’t been skittled.
Came to Smoo cave on the north coast; That name is another corruption from the original Norse name: This is a very large cave and the road actually goes over the top of the cavern. It sits at the end of an 800metre long 30m deep and narrow sea chasm with sheer sided cliffs. Possibly the whole length of it was a cave at some long ago point in time. Now the mouth of the cave is 10 to 12 metres wide and about 4 or 5 m high. The cave goes back a long way and high up on one side lit by artificial lighting are some ferns. The most striking feature though is the 21metre high waterfall that drops into the cave. A wooden walkway and viewing platform allows you to get a good view of the bottom of the falls. To see the top you climb back to the top, cross the road and take the little walkway and the bridge over the stream is really over the top of the waterfall, you see it drop away immediately below. About 80m after exiting the cave the stream enters the sea in the chasm.
There are some fine golden sandy beaches along this northern coast and when we came to Durness we saw a sign ‘award winning beach’; now what the heck is that supposed to mean: The tourist office is closed for the season so we couldn’t ask there. Anyway, out there in the surf, and it was quite a good surf we saw two fellows on surfboards and one on a boogy board. They were wearing wet or dry suits: I don’t know what the water temperature would have been, I didn’t go down and try it but the air temp was about 11˚C and the chilly wind would have lowered it to around 6˚C so it was a tad chilly you could say.
A great many of the sea lochs all around Scotland have fish farms in them and as we drove around this part of the coast we saw many of those farms.
Now we started heading back south across moorland with peat bogs and bracken and heather covered hills, here and there are some areas of deep green where there is a pine forest usually with a cluster of golden larch amongst them. Followed a long glen leading from loch to loch with fishing being a popular pastime along the way; one long loch, loch Shin is really a dam and has a hydro electric station below the wall. You’d think that in this country with so many lochs that they wouldn’t want to build more water storage but they do. Took a long walk around the Balblair forest and met lots of people walking their dogs and other out riding their mountain bikes on the specially built trails. From a high point we got a great view over the glen and the lochs.
Went into the little town of Edderton to see yet another standing stone, this one is supposed to have a Pictish (from the time of the Picts before the Norse) inscription on it, and we did find it in the middle of a field with high sheep proof fencing all around and no stile or kissing gate to provide access so we didn’t get a close look at it. Some way further on we found ourselves back in Tain, we had passed this way on the northbound trip but hadn’t gone into the town. This time we went and had a look at the old toll house that stands right in the town centre. It’s a lovely old building but being a Sunday nothing was open for us to find any information about it.
On the peninsular between Dornoch Firth and Cromarty Firth we came to a RSPB hide in a wetlands area. This is a nature reserve for the migrating birds, mainly wetlands species. It covers 1600 hectares and this hide provides a good opportunity to watch some of them. Overhead we had seen large flocks of swans passing and even larger flocks of geese. We had thought that they were graylag geese but according to the posters in the hide they were more likely to be pink footed geese. The swans are whooping swans. With the aid of the telescope provided in the hide we could also see thousands of other birds, some we could identify whilst others were too far away to see properly. Spent at least an hour here probably much longer watching these birds many of which have come from their summer breeding grounds in Russia but others like the lapwing live here permanently:
In this same area we came across a church where there is a grave slab with an early Pictish carving. It’s a Christian carving from the 8th Century and it’s kept inside the locked church so we only got a glimpse of it through a dirty window.
In the town of Invergordon we looked a lot at the murals that decorate the sides and fronts of many of the buildings in the business centre. Each one has a different theme, one is a bagpipe band, another the fire service, yet another has all the birds from the reserve. It was something different to standing stones. At Beauly we had a look at the old Abby. This ruin is really in quite good shape, you can see the black from a fire that must have destroyed the roof and other parts, and there is no glass in the windows but most of the red sandstone block work is in good condition It was a very large Abby:
We came back into Inverness and spent a short while looking around again. St Andrews Cathedral was the main object of our attention. It has square towers now but from a painting inside we see that it once had tall spires. In the front it has a magnificent stained glass window. The city seemed just as busy on a Sunday afternoon as it did on a weekday; we’d thought it might be a bit quieter:
Had a look at the old battlefield at Culloden when German George’s forces soundly defeated Catholic Charley’s and brought to an end the Jacobite rebellion on the 16th April 1746. It’s just an ordinary field like most others in Scotland; an old cottage on one side is said to have survived the battle, its called Leanach cottage. There is a large stone in one place saying that the English are buried in that area and a large cairn says that the Scottish fatalities are listed under their clan names. Little signs say that a certain place is where the front line was, and I wonder who marked that place, surely no-one came back the next day and marked it thinking that in 250 years time people will want to know this. Probably some one 100 years after the even decided that’s where it should have been. Gee I’m a cynical B----, am I not.
Also visited the old Pluscardan Abby: This Abby is now occupied by Benedictine monks and part of it is open to visitors. These monks have only been there since 1948, before that for many centuries it was abandoned. It has been restored and is quite like the one we saw at Beauly in design. The chapel has some lovely stained glass windows. It is situated out in the countryside on the side of a ridge covered in dense woodland, and took quite a bit of finding. Some historical sites are well marked while others are not.
Forres has a nice town centre with a building that looks like another toll gate in the centre, and in Elgin we saw the old ruined Cathedral. It must have been a huge building, much larger that many I’ve seen, or so it appears to me.
There are also many castles but we haven’t bothered to visit any more. We did however, see another stone slab. This one is just on the edge of Forres and stands in a glass enclosure. It is of Pictish origin from the 9th or 10th centuries and very elaborately carved on all 4 sides. One side depicts a battle in several panels; no one knows what battle it was but believe it must have been very important to have been immortalized in this manner. The stone stands 6m high and was found lying in a field but it didn’t say when.
In this area east of Inverness we have seen a lot of whiskey distilleries. Nearly every decent sized village has one and we saw the Glenfiddick, Glenlivit and Dewars distilleries all within a few miles, there were others too.
©Lynette Regan 5th November 2007