Visiting Dunvegan Castle

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Today mark ten months away from home and also, one more week before we return to Toronto. Benjamin and Joshua are delighted to be counting down with single digits.

We slept in a bit later this morning, and having a coffee maker at this hostel was a nice bonus (we rarely find one) so we could actually have real coffee rather than the instant stuff.

After breakfast, I got talking with a Taiwanese women who was looking at her map, planning her day. I told her of our plans to visit the castle and later, seeing us set to go in our car, she asked if she could join us. With no luggage in the car, there was lots of room so Amy joined us for the day.

Amy has been traveling for several weeks and started off working as a volunteer on an organic farm in the Sommerset part of England. Her English was quite good, though sometimes it was a bit hard to figure out what she was saying.

The road to Dunvegan Castle was quite narrow in places, and we think that somewhere along here we made a small scratch in the car finish as we pulled over to let another car pass. All told our trip took about an hour.

Our connection with the Dunvegan Castle is that it is here that the Chiefs of the McLeod clan lived. That said, it is not the most beautiful castle we have seen, being a bit plane looking and not terribly ornate. It looks more functional than beautiful.

Like most of the castle we have been to, you can't take photos inside this building. It is attractively furnished and has some great portraits of the clan chiefs, though I am beginning to feel the inside of one castle is not terribly different from the inside of the next one. Benjamin and Joshua seemed more interested in the prison: a small chamber below one of the room where a dummy sat and a audio loop of coughing played to complete the picture.

Outside the Castle, we walked down to the shoreline which is quite and impressive vantage point to see the castle from. After this, we toured the various gardens including the water garden, the circular garden, and the walled garden.

For lunch, our plan was to have a picnic by a coral beach down the road from the castle. It turned out to be a fair drive to the parking lot for this beach, and still a further walk though cow pastures to get there. Seeing all the stone beaches as we walked, it seemed hard to believe we would find a coral beach in this area, but after a short rise, there it was. The beach seemed to have been directly lifter off some desert island and plunked down on the coast of Scotland. It even had a patch of aquamarine water off shore.

We sat on ate our lunch on the edge of the field next to the beach, with cattle grazing next to us. At one point a calf walked up to Evy and Amy and smelled their hair, evidently deciding it would not be good to eat.

After lunch, Joshua and Benjamin climbed a high hill overlooking the water. We had heard people had spotted whales from here a few days before, though today there was no sign of them. The view though, was awesome with steep cliff on the other side of the bay and small islands leading off into the distance.

After a long and hot walk back to the car, we drove back towards the hostel. As it was still too early to get in, we drove back down to the town docks and visited the pottery stores again, picking up some gifts for relatives.

When we returned to the hostel, we prepared dinner while Benjamin got some more school work done. As the sun was setting in the evening, I got some photos of what appears to be wild horned sheep, feeding on the side of the hostel path.

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