Roaming the Ancient Sites and Old Villages PART 2

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Roaming the Ancient Sites and Old Villages of England and Scotland PART 2

Contact me if you are interested in photos at [e-mail].

Chapter 7—Lancaster & The Lake District

Again, reluctant to leave, I headed to Lancaster, where my friend Don so generously invited me to take a few days break at his house. This drive was about four hours on the M5 motorway, my first time on UK’s “freeway.” It went amazingly well. I noticed the same things about drivers here as on the smaller roads—they drive faster than we do, but I didn’t see drivers cutting people off, tailgating, weaving lanes or going slow in the fast lane. Another wonderful thing is that there are almost no SUVs here! No full-size pickup trucks! It was heavenly. The only large vehicles are commercial. There were lots of big lorries, so I just sandwiched myself between the trucks in the slow lane and pretty much stayed there.
The rest areas, called Moto stops, are quite evolved. They are on their own on-and-off slip roads, so you can get off without worrying about getting lost finding services or getting back on. And everything is there. Beside petrol (which is sold by the liter at around $1.50), there was a food court, a gourmet shop and deli, a game room, a kiddie room, and even places where you could lie down for a spell. The huge immaculately clean bathrooms even had showers, no charge, with vases of fresh flowers on the counters. A vending machine sold chewable toothbrushes. It’s a fine bristled plastic device with tooth powder on it that you chew. You move it around with your tongue to get it around. It works pretty well too! Outside was a big lawn for walking dogs plus a big water dish and bowl of bisquits by the entrance. Cool.
By now I really needed a domestic break to pack up a box to send home, do some laundry, and get a new wheel cover for my rental car. I had really chewed up the front one the first couple of days driving with Clive. Don lived in a two story Victorian row house by himself. I met Don years ago on an archaeology listserv, loved his sense of humor, and somehow we managed to stay in touch until I made the leap over the pond. He took me to pubs where I met his friends. One pub had quiz night where everyone formed teams and answered trivia questions. The team that won got a prize. We ordered beer, but sandwiches were served free.

The Lake District

We spent a day in the Lake District, which was just phenomenal. Don drove, so I could relax and take it all in. This area is one gorgeous view and pretty village after another. We had tea in Threlkeld and then drove on to Keswick. It was market day and I bought gingerbread, cheese and some used Thomas Hardy books. We had a walk around the outer edge of Grasmere before going into the village center. The path wound between a stream and a large sheep meadow where there were lots of wild flowers and sheep napping under huge chestnut trees. There is a lot to see in the Lake District that we didn’t get to, like Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter’s homes. But I did see one of the best humpbacked bridges in England. It had trees arching over it and a gorgeous meadow with sheep next to it with the fells (big hills) behind that. I took a lot of pictures of this one.
The Castlerigg stone circle was a highlight of this drive. It’s a large, complete stone circle with portal stones on two sides and sheep and lambs ambling through it. And the views all around it are magnificent. I loved dallying here. It was the kind of place you’d like to capture all for yourself and build a treehouse and never leave. Farther along we pulled over and Don pointed out a place up high in a cleft between two rocky hills where you could see large flakes of rock had accumulated. It was the site of a stone axe factory from the Neolithic!
Back at Don’s, I went online to change my plans a bit—drop my car off in Edinburgh instead of Heathrow and fly back to London instead of driving. It would give me an extra day in Scotland, and I was getting pretty tired by now. But it would mean I would miss Hadrian’s Wall, which is like the British version of the great wall of China in miniature. There are forts along it that were built by the Romans. It was built to keep out marauding Scots! Ah well, next trip.
Initially, I had planned to spend the last three or four days of my trip in Amsterdam and nearby Haarlem, but by this point I had decided it would just be too much, so I chose to spend the time in Scotland instead, which turned out to be an excellent choice.

Chapter 8—Scotland I

I drove from Lancaster to Perth the first day, bypassing Edinburgh for now. I was surrounded by beautiful landscapes, and it was not uncommon to see a castle off in the distance. I was very excited to be in Scotland!
Coming into a large town was always befuddling, as I had no idea where to go. Usually I would head for the center of town and try my luck looking for a
B & B. I found a nice place in Perth across from the library, then went to explore the neighborhood. In one direction there was a humongous Safeway store, and again, I was impressed to see a play area outside and special parking along the front of the store for pregnant women and mothers with young children, as well as the usual disabled parking. In the other direction was an interesting neighborhood with lots of odd little shops, like Fergus’s Bingo Palace and many more with bizarre names. Most of them were closed, but I strolled past a kilt shop, a meat market, a tobacconist, and a malt whiskey shop. The movie theater looked dated, circa 1955, but had a number of fairly recent movies playing
The next morning, I toured the Caithness glass factory. It was fascinating watching the hot glass being worked. I had planned to buy something, but was surprised to find that their designs weren’t very good. I did stop at the Scottish Liqueur Center and bought a bottle of Columba Cream, a liqueur like Bailey’s, but made with single malt scotch. Amazing stuff!! Also stopped at the Dalwhinnie Distillery for some malt whisky samples, which are still sitting in my cupboard waiting for interested friends to come over and sample. Oddly, here and later at Edinburgh castle were the only places I saw a man in a kilt during all my time in Scotland. I did hear bagpipes while sitting on a beach on the western edge of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, but we’ll get to that later.
I had decided to go to the Orkney Islands to the north of Scotland first, as that was the place I was most anxious to see, so I drove to Inverness the next day through more countryside. Ruined crofts dotted the landscape, abandoned homesteads from days gone by. Southern Scotland looks much like England except the houses are different. I’d say 90%!o(MISSING)f the houses, even most new ones are all the same style—a two-story rectangular block with plain windows, no trim and a chimney at each end. They are all stone, though many have now been stuccoed and/or pebbled on the outside—keeps the wind out better. Northern Scotland looks much different. More hilly with lots of lochs, rivers, and bridges, with mountains in the upper highlands.
Arriving in Inverness, I got a bit lost, as it is a large town and people were pretty vague about giving me directions. I found most of the B & Bs were full, but eventually found one on the other side of the river. It was owned by a very nice man who lived there with his aged mother and his young Tunisian lover (!). There was another guest there from Canada, an older man, and we hooked up for dinner, walking to a modern pub where the food was nothing special. He wanted a ride to his friend’s house that evening and invited me to go with him. It was a former co-worker on a dam project some 35 years before, and he hadn’t seen him since then, so it was a reunion. It was nice to get a chance to visit locals in their home. He tried to convince me to go to Lewis instead of Orkney cause that’s where he was headed. He really just wanted a ride instead of taking the bus. I ended up resenting this guy—he wanted to ply me with liquor and ravage my innocence. Gag me. I ended up going to Orkney and then Lewis and was very glad to leave him behind.

Chapter 9—The Orkney Islands

Next day, I drove up to Scrabster on the north coast to get the ferry to Orkney. Now I was getting BBC Scotland on the radio, which I really loved because I love to listen to the Scots accent. I even listened to the sports reports (which I never do at home) just to hear the men talk.
Due to the passenger ferry being out of service, I had to take a bus to John O’ Groats to catch the passenger ferry, while my car went from Scrabster. Then they bussed us across South Ronaldsay island to Stromness on the main island, where I picked up my car and booked a room at the Royal Hotel. Accommodation was scarce here! But for £3 the tourist office will call around for you until they find you a place, well worth it for tired, unfamiliar travelers.
Orkney is really extraordinary. I loved Stromness. My hotel was on the main street (there’s only one) which is very narrow and paved with stone, and many of the buildings have no space between them. It runs parallel to the shoreline of the little port, and has a very old European feel to it. I loved the way it didn’t get dark until after 11 and got light again at 3 am. I had a nice little room on the 3rd floor overlooking the old rooftops. I ate breakfast (comes with the room) and dinner at the hotel (expensive—a cheap dinner was £14, or about $25) but for lunch I picked up some Orkney cheese, oakcakes and fruit to take with me. One morning, I felt brave and sampled the blood pudding. It’s actually made like a big sausage and cut in slices and fried (I think!). It’s roughly the consistency of polenta, mealy, and it’s black. I think it is just made from blood and ground up oatmeal. It didn’t taste bad at all, but after satisfying my curiosity, I didn’t want any more of it. One wonders why they would eat such a thing, but when you look into the history of life in northern Scotland, you know that they had very few vegetables. Oats was the staple diet, with what meat they could raise and fish they could catch. With food scarce, they wasted nothing, hence dishes like haggis—a sheep’s stomach stuffed with a ground mixture of oats, lungs, and other animal parts. I passed on this one.

Skara Brae
Skara Brae was a primary destination on this trip. It is a 5000-year-old stone village that was exposed at the water’s edge during a storm, sometime in the mid-1800s, though they did not start excavating it until 1928. It’s the Flintstones for real. The houses did not need to be restored like many sites—even the stone furniture is in place and intact. Once it had been exposed, they only had to remove the filled in sand. They even found personal items on the dressers (which are in a museum). It is so amazing to walk through an ancient site like this, seeing it exactly like it was found. There is an admission cost, a visitor center, and docents on site. They’ve made a replica house just like the actual ones, but with a roof made of poles and covered with thatch and a fire in the hearth. This one you can go and snoop around in, and a docent tells all about it.
The round stone houses, minus their pole and thatch roofs, are built close together with very low doors because of the cold winds. Midden, a conglomeration of shells, bones, and other household waste, was packed many feet thick around the outside walls, or so it seemed. Actually the midden mound was there first, from a previous community, and circles were dug out, and the stone houses built in—very stable and well insulated. Low, stone-lined passages connected the houses making it seem like the whole village is underground with just the rooftops sticking up.
You can walk along the top of the midden and look down into the houses. Each one had a dresser—two large shelves of stone slabs held up by pillar-like blocks—a bed box or two, a hearth, and storage areas. So beautiful!! A bed box is a rectangle, big enough to contain two adults sitting, set against a wall and delineated by slabs of stone set on their sides about a foot or two high with pillars at the corners. Hides were then draped over the top and the box filled with grass or sheep skins. It is believed they slept sitting up because laying down mimicked death, or invited death, or something like that. Notice the stone boxes set into the floor around the dresser. These were water-tight tanks used to keep bait or fresh catch; Early refrigeration!

The Maeshowe Tomb
The Maeshowe tomb is a finely preserved site made of massive stone slabs about eight inches thick, six or eight feet wide, and about 17 feet long—you can’t imagine how they ever moved them—stacked on four sides like a graduated pyramid. Only a grassy mound shows on the outside, but within the low passageway lies a magnificent chamber with small burial chambers off on the sides and Viking graffiti runes carved into the walls. The Vikings broke into and robbed the tomb in the 8th century. And the writing truly is graffiti, full of boasting and gossip! This site could only be entered with a guide. It is one of the most magnificent ancient tombs on the planet and is a world heritage site, as is Skara Brae.

The Broch of Gurness
One of my favorite places was the Broch of Gurness, a broch tower ruin. A broch is a circular fortified tower, about 30 feel high, with double walls with stairs between them, and they’re only found in Scotland.
It is surrounded by a small village and it’s all encircled with earthen ramparts and ditches, about 2000 years old. It is a gorgeous site next to a turquoise sea and one of the best preserved of over 100 broch ruins in the Orkneys—and I had it all to myself. The foundation stones marked out the walls, and you could still see the people’s hearths and storage cubbies and stone furnishings. At the entrance to the broch, you could see the depression ground into the stone in the doorway that was part of the hinge of the stone slab door. There was a low alcove in the side of the wall where it is thought guard dogs were kept to lunge out at the feet of trespassers.

The Brough of Birsay
The Brough of Bursay is a Norse settlement ruin on a near island that is only reachable at low tide. The fabulous ancient sea bed is exposed, composed of huge slabs tilted at an angle as if a large stack fell over like a deck of cards. There was an extensive variety of textures and colors among the stones. The water was crystal clear with tide pools full of interesting flora and fauna. I proceeded across the seabed and explored the Norse ruins on the island. On my way back, I saw a woman picking things out of the sand so I approached her. She was an Orkadian (native of Orkney) and was collecting colorful tiny sea shells, which I didn’t even notice until she pointed them out. There was a fascinating array of colors and types, some conch shaped ones less than a quarter inch long and a bright coral color. Once I began to see them it was hard to stop collecting. I took a nice jarful home.
The sea is navy blue and wild with white caps breaking, turning to turquoise in the shallows. Locals say pods of orcas have been spotted near the coastline. And in season, puffins can be seen nesting in the cliffs.

More Ancient Sites on Orkney
The Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness are fabulous stone circles made of huge upright Caithness slabs, like the tomb. These slabs are proportionately very thin, and erosion has exposed the layered composition of the stone. I also visited some smaller sites, including the Unstan chambered tomb, which looks like a grassy mound with a low square hole in the side. I crawled through a very low passageway and found myself in a stone-lined room with pillars at the corners (that may have been there before the tomb was built) and smaller chambers at the sides. Bones and skulls were usually put in these tombs after the eagles had picked all the flesh off of a body laid out on a platform.
I was very curious to see the Rennebister Earth House, a souterrain (underground house). I had a hard time finding it because it is on a farmer’s property, just behind his house. I ambled up his driveway and asked if I could look. He lets people come and see it—to him it’s just a hole in the ground. It was very cool down there. I descended into the fenced-off “manhole” on a vertical steel ladder, about six feet. The room was lined with stone with stone columns holding up the slabs. A tunnel led to the lower portion of an annex that had once been partially above ground.

Scotland’s Northwest Coast

After four days, I took a ferry back to the mainland and drove along the north coast and around the northwestern corner of Scotland to Ullapool where I would catch the ferry to the Isle of Lewis. I was astonished at the beauty of the beaches of the northwest coast. I wouldn’t have guessed in a million years that these North Atlantic beaches would have white sands and turquoise waters like the Mediterranean. Rocky in places, but yellow gorse bushes and green turf on the edges of the sand make a very pretty picture. The mountains here are huge, granite, and quite intimidating. These are the highlands, dotted with lochs. There were awe inspiring landscapes everywhere you looked. And here, as through all of rural Scotland, ruins of stone crofts (farmsteads) and manor houses dot the landscape, completely abandoned.
By 4 o’clock, I realized I wouldn’t reach Ullapool until late, so I stopped at a B & B next to the main road on the edge of a saltwater loch in the hamlet of Kylesku. This was a new house, plain on the outside, but very cozy and nice on the inside. The woman who answered the door had been ironing in the living room with the music on loud. She asked me in, showed me the room overlooking the loch, gave me the key to the house, and invited me to join them at an inn up the road to hear some music before she even thought to ask me my name. No one ever asked me for an ID, and only a few times did I ever have to sign anything, except in the hotels. These are very trusting people, and it worried me, because they are quite vulnerable. They owned a little shop down the road that sold vintage dolls and handmade dolls, dollhouses and doll clothes. I was the only guest. She made me a lovely breakfast and packed me a little lunch to take with me. I think it was about £25, or $42.00.

Ullapool

I drove on to Ullapool descending into this darling little port town from above. It is set deep within an inlet and the waterfront is lined with neat white cottages and shops. I arrived before noon so had the day to roam before catching the ferry in the morning. It was a bit touristy, but still really nice—very picturesque. I bought CDs of some great Scottish music here. It was late May, and already the town was nearly booked up. But eventually I found a sweet B & B in the home of Penny Brown. Her house was typical inside—flowered wallpaper, wainscoting, lots of pictures and antiques There was a 400-year-old trunk in my room that had been in her family all that time. Penny had a lot of wild red hair, her children were grown, and she was a militant vegan. The breakfast room was right out of a magazine, with cozied tea pot, little cloth napkins covering dishes, flowered tablecloth—you get the picture. There was a young Dutch couple there, too, with whom I had a limited conversation at breakfast. They were a little dismayed at the vegan breakfast, as it was not at all what they expected.
The fare for the ferry to the Isle of Lewis was £140, or about $260, and I wavered back and forth all morning whether I should spend the money or not. Five minutes before it was time to board I decided I would more likely regret not going that be sorry I did, so I bought the ticket and drove on to the ferry. This ferry was more like a little cruise ship than the simple ones I took to the Orkneys.

Chapter 10—Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland

As the ferry approached Stornoway, I got a wide view of this small fishing village, the only town on Lewis. Most of the buildings are very old. Modern life has only just brushed the edges a bit, though they did have a Woolworth’s. Scottish Gaelic is spoken here, though everyone speaks English too. All of the road signs are in Gaelic with little English translations below. Even as remote as this place is, most of the accommodations were filled. The tourist office finally found a great B & B on the west edge of the island, which was actually perfect because it was nearer to the ancient sites that I had come here to absorb. As you will see, the trip here was worth the expense many times over.
Half of the Isle of Lewis is called Harris, and it is home to the famous Harris Tweed. This traditional fabric is woven in people’s homes, making it a true cottage industry. Each weaver makes their own patterns and colors—the rule being that no artificial power can be used; it must be done manually. So some of the looms are powered by bicycle. All the weaver does once the warp is ready is pedal, and the loom does the weaving. Stornoway had a Harris Tweed Center, which you would imagine would be a nice emporium-like store, but in fact was an old wooden stable in a rustic little courtyard.
Regretably, I don’t have photos of all the sites here—camera trouble—but I have some great video.

The Arnol Black House
Lewis is a stark and barren island for the most part, treeless, covered with lumpy, peaty moors frosted in heather. But the beaches here are unbelievable! Gorgeous rocky cliffs, but grassy, too, with coves of pale sand and waters in shades of turquoise in the shallows to navy blue. But what I came here for were the superb ancient sites, so I headed out immediately from my B & B to explore. I was headed toward the Callanish stones—Scotland’s Stonehenge—but was drawn off my path by intriguing signs I saw on the road. The first was the “black house,” a restored house typical of the dwellings lived in here for many centuries. There was a small museum next to it, and across the gravel road the “white house,” and next to that the ruin of another black housestone walls four feet thick with low entryways and turf growing along the tops where the roof had once been.
The black house is a long, stone house with no windows or chimney and a stone floor. One end of the house is for the animals, and it had a dirt floor. They were built with double stone walls with earth in between, about four feet thick and 4-5 feet high, then a timber and thatch roof, kept down in the wind by netting made from heather twine and weighed down by stones all around the eaves. There is a hearth on the floor in the middle of the main room, and a peat fire is kept going there 24/7. Peat is very pungent smelling but still aromatic and produces a lot of smoke, so with no chimney or windows, smoke could only escape under the eaves of the thatch. The game hung from the roof above the fire to smoke. There was a peat fire burning there during my visit. Most everything on the inside became blackened with the smoke, hence, the name “black house.” In the 19th century the peat hearth gave way to fireplaces at the ends with chimneys, and in the 20th century people were putting wallpaper up, rugs on the floor, and had normal furniture. But other than that, the black house stayed the same. People lived in these houses on Lewis as recently as 1970!
During the early 20th century, the younger generations began building the white houses, called so because they were new and not smoky. These were also made from stone but were more like a regular house. The walls were two feet thick, making for deep window sills. There was wallboard and wallpaper inside, wood floors, a proper kitchen with a woodstove, a fireplace and chimney, and a second-floor sleeping room. Recessed into the kitchen wall was a bed box alcove, not unlike the ones at Skara Brae. The white houses were built on the same croft (a farmstead handed down through generations) by the younger generation, and parents/grandparents continued to live in the old black house. Later, many of the white houses were stuccoed and/or lime washed or pebbled to seal out the wind. This also gave them a more contemporary look. Then, in the 1960s, the next generation began building modern houses, also on the same croft. When the parents died, the black house was either used for storage or animals or fell into disuse. Sometimes the rock was salvaged for other building projects, but many remain to this day.
You can see when you overlook some of the crofts the ruins of the old black house next to the modern house, and sometimes a white house, too. Remnants of the old way of life are still visible on Lewis.

The Norse Mill and Kiln
Farther down the road, I encountered a small sign that said Norse Mill and Kiln. I was intrigued and turned down the dirt road, which soon ended in a little car park with a gravel path leading over the hill. I had no idea what to expect. As I walked the path, I noticed beautiful mosses on the ground of various colors and textures, wild flowers, heather (not quite in bloom yet), and lumpy, boggy peat beds. Eventually, I came over a rise and saw two small stone buildings, not unlike the black house but much smaller. One had a wooden water flue leading into it, that was the mill. The other had an odd arrangement of low fireplace at the mouth of a small tunnel that fed into the bottom of a large stone pit with poles leaning tepee-like over it, joined at the center. I later learned that corn and oats were laid across these to dry before being milled.
The mill was like something out of Rumplestiltskin—an ovalish structure, not more than15 x 10, a tiny stream flowing into it on the uphill side which turned a primitive mill stone and flowed out the other side. It was no longer functioning, but water still flowed through it. A wooden hopper fed the grain to the millstones, two round flat stones about eight inches thick and three feet across, one on top of the other. There was a little guest book inside for people to sign and a pamphlet telling about the mill. There was also a torch (flashlight) and a big wooden mallet (not sure of it’s purpose), just laying on the floor. You’d never see that in the U.S., someone would have run off with them long ago. But here, even in this isolated spot, people just don’t do that. There used to be hundreds of these mills on the island, each little settlement having their own. It is called a Norse mill because it is believed this style of mill was brought by the Vikings during the late 700s. The mill stones can still be found lying around the island; there were two standing on each side of the driveway where I was staying, and my hostess said her husband had come across them when they were building their house.

The Callanish Stones
The next morning, I drove to Callanish, a primary destination on this journey. It is a large stone circle with stone rows bisecting it making a cross, the longest leg of the cross being a double row and serving as an avenue of approach. This site is a few millennia pre-Christian, so it is not the christianized Celtic cross, though it looks like that from the air. It is magical to walk through. There is a burial site inside the circle. There is a visitor center and there were a lot of tourists here, so I opted to return later that day, as the site is always open. How I wanted to be there at night with the full moon and stay until sunrise! But I was always too exhausted at day’s end to stay up all night.
Nearby is a small stone circle on a hilltop called Callanish Three that I had all to myself. I walked the path up the hill to find a beautiful circle with a four-poster inside it—four stones set to make a square. From here the main Callanish site can be seen across the vale.

Great Bernard, Bosta Beach, and the Iron Age House
I proceeded on to Great Bernard, an island tucked so close to Lewis it is accessed by a bridge. More standing stones could be seen right at the end of the bridge on the edge of the cliff. I was headed to the Bota Beach Iron Age village, which was discovered only a few years ago when a storm washed the sand away (like Skara Brae). One of the Iron Age houses was moved back from the beach and restored; the rest was reburied in the sand to preserve it. It is a lot like the black houses that I described earlier but older and a little more primitive. Here was a middle example of how little dwellings have changed from Skara Brae to the Black House. Finding this place was like going back in time. The road wound on to the far edge of the island. At the village of Bota, there was a small museum with artifacts that had been found at the Iron Age site—bone combs and tools and other household items. I drove further down a little one-lane road till I finally reached a small gravel car park for the site. A modern cemetery was located here, the path to the beach winding around it between two bluffs.
The beach itself was the most beautiful one on the whole trip, which is really saying something—a small cove with large grassy berms around it and stone cliffs where it meets the sea. Again, the water here was that deep blue, fading to turquoise in the shallows. If you look on a map, Bota Beach is at the edge of the world, on the western-most edge of Europe. Being here, I got a “far, far away” feeling. I climbed the grassy bluff facing the cove to eat my lunch and savor the landscape before continuing on to the Iron Age house. I had it all to myself, though it was a gorgeous, sunny day. Then the faint sound of bagpipes started to drift my way. No, I thought, that is just too perfect. But yes, I was definitely hearing it, so I walked to the top of the bluff and saw a small group gathered around one of the graves in the cemetery, including the piper. It was not a new grave, so I figured it was relatives visiting from afar, and indeed it was, some MacDonald from Canada. I gathered up my things a bit later and proceeded to the site. Some people returning from the site passed me on the path, and said how much they enjoyed it and I realized it was this same group (little did I know I would run into this same group two more times).
As the path wound around the dunes, I could see the thatch of the roof covered by the now familiar heather netting weighed down by stones all around. The walls of the house were below sand level, double walls four feet apart filled with sand, or so it seemed. Like Skara Brae, it was discovered that in fact the interior of the house had been excavated out of the sand, and the inner wall built (by the way, there is no mortar used in this or in the black houses. These folks really knew how to stack rocks!) Then, leaving a four foot thick bank of sand in place around the inner wall, they dug out from there, then built the outer wall against the bank. Sand was then allowed to drift against the outer wall, and the stones were stacked at a slight angle so that the more wind and sand pressure there was, the more stable the structure became, don’t ask me how. So then all that really was visible above the sand was the pole and thatch roof. A stone-lined entryway led down into the house, which probably had to be cleared of sand regularly. I made my way down and was surprised to see a woman there tending the peat fire. She was actually a docent and she told about the furnishings and the lifestyle of the occupants. In this harsh climate, it was not an easy life. There were skins and bone implements, a small enclosed basket with a handle made from heather with stones inside: a baby rattle. Even in this limited space, the animals were kept at one end of the house. Drain channels were dug into the floor, which if I remember right was stone. It was dark and smoky and put you right back 2000 years. On my way back to my car I found a bleach-out sheep’s jaw, complete with teeth. I brought it home for my dentist.

The Dun Carloway Broch
The Dun Carloway broch, a fortified round house like the Broch of Gurness on Orkney, originally 3-4 stories high, had the same double walls and stairs as the other brochs I’d seen. But in this one, I could actually go between the double walls and see the stone steps. They were thin and crooked with a very short rise between them. Below it were the crofts of the villagers—the ruling family lived in the broch. Part of the outer wall had been built around the natural rocky outcrop on the bluff so that the outcrop became part of the wall. I noticed this same thing at Edinburgh castle (yet to come) where the outcrop became part of the castle.

Iron Age Duns
Another very cool thing on Lewis are the Iron Age duns (pronounced doon) in the lochs. I recognized them from an article in my archaeology magazine, which was really thrilling because they are not marked in any way. They are little islands made of rocks piled into the loch, just big enough for a round stone house, with a 30-40 foot causeway to the shore. Most are just a wee island with all or part of the causeway showing, but I saw one that still had the rocks on it that had been the house. As I drove, I could often smell burning peat and found out that some folks still burn it for heat. Every so often I would see a peat cutter working on the moor, stacking the blocks of cut peat to dry. Peat is an accumulation of decayed mosses and other plant matter on the surface and can be many feet deep. It dries hard as a rock and burns long and hot. This is what I really loved about Lewis—you can see remnants of the old ways if you know what to look for.

Back to Callanish
It was after six by then, so I returned to Callanish. There were less people, but still eight or so milling about. At least the big blue tourist bus was gone from the tea room at the other end of the site, visible right through the stones. It kind of spoiled the picture. Speaking of peat, these stones were obscured by peat six feet deep until they were excavated in 1857. Until then, no one realized how tall these stones were, the tallest in the center measures over 15 feet.
I videoed the stones from all angles, then sat on a near boulder to absorb the mystic atmosphere. The stones are on a rise, and below it you could still see the “lazy beds,” an ancient farming method where peat was built up in wide rows, leaving furrows between them for drainage, the crops planted on top. Before long a small group of people meandered over to me—by their clothes I recognized them as the group at Bota Beach with the piper in the cemetery. The piper was a Scot, and he was showing his visiting relatives around. This was when I learned they were McDonalds from Canada. We chatted a bit—oddly, they thought from my “accent” (I have an accent?) that I was from Canada, too. I was hungry by now, so set off to find some supper.
I quickly learned that unless I drove back to Stornoway, there was only one place to eat, a hotel up the road. So there I went, and who should I run into again but the McDonalds. They asked me to join them, bought me a pint, and we all had salmon. There are lots of salmon farms on Lewis, so the fish was certainly fresh, but unfortunately a bit overcooked. I had heard that the British did that, and I did encounter it a few times. Really, I hadn’t had an excellent meal since leaving southern England.

Back to the Mainland

I could spend months exploring the western isles—there are ancient sites scattered everywhere. But, alas, I had to catch the ferry back to Ullapool the next day. I returned to Stornoway early the next morning and walked around a bit peeking into the shops. I found a secondhand shop to donate my red old-lady sweater and my raincoat. I hadn’t needed it much and was trying to lighten my suitcase, though no matter what I did, it never seemed to get any lighter. The ferry ride took about two hours and gave me time to write postcards. I immediately left Ullapool for Inverness, where I had booked a room at the Glen Uig B & B where I had stayed before. I didn’t want to spend an hour or two looking for accommodations again. David sent me to a pub a little out of town for dinner. I had the misfortune of ordering the lasagna. Clearly the chef had never had real Italian food. I got a sense here from the conversation that some folks were not too keen on America after Bush corralled them into Iraq on false pretenses.

Culloden, Clava Cairns and Findhorn

Next morning, I set off for Edinburgh, the last destination on my trip, and decided to see a few places on my way there. Actually these sites were a little out of my way but worthwhile nonetheless. I made a brief stop at the Culloden battle field where the clans were defeated for the last time in 1745—
a very sad place. But just down the road a bit were the Clava Cairns, three big roofless tombs, in a lovely grassy wood? land setting, made of piled up stones and shaped like a doughnut with a passage from the outside to a small empty circle in the middle. These were very large and extraordinarily beautiful, each one surrounded by a complete stone circle. Neolithic cup and ring marks could be found on some of the stones (their meaning is unknown).
Then I made a short visit to Findhorn; all you boomers may remember a book The Magic of Findhorn back in the 70s? Some folks had discovered a unique garden spot where the vegetables grew to enormous size due to instructions received by a woman from, well, somewhere in the great beyond, or nature spirits, or . . . something. I wanted to see what the alternative community was up to and I found the lifestyle like parts of California all in one place. It’s a very well-developed community now, and they do a lot of experimental projects. They had everything alternative you could imagine here: housing, energy, health, spirituality, art, organic gardening, and on and on. It was quite fun, but I couldn’t stay long, as I wanted to reach Edinburgh before four o’clock, and it was four hours away.

Edinburgh

Edinburgh is a large, old, fascinating city, but it was actually my least favorite place of the whole trip (that will give you some idea how extraordinary my last six weeks had been!). Some great old buildings, but Edinburgh Castle and the street below it, the Royal mile, felt like a theme park to me. I’m not a city person, and I guess I was getting pretty tired by then. I stayed in Portobello, a near suburb along the edge of the firth and had a great room on the third story of a nice small hotel. I took the bus into the city and walked up to the castle and spent some time there. It’s a great place but felt too much like a themepark attraction for my taste. There is a massive cannon that shot humongous 18-inch boulders, and a tiny chapel the oldest in Scotland from the 12th century. I saw the tiny room where Mary Queen of Scots gave birth. I bought a tartan blanket and went on my way. Walking down the Royal mile, I had lunch at the Scotch whisky center (and yes, picked up a few small samples to bring home for tasting) which was very good. In fact all the food I had in Edinburgh was very good. I bought a wool tartan cape/shawl kind of thing, stopped for some tea and Victoria sponge (this was my favorite dessert here), then headed early back to my hotel to relax and enjoy the view—my room looked right down on to the beach at the edge of the Firth of Forth.

Going Home

The next morning, I went to the Scotland Wal-Mart, which has a different name, but is in fact owned by the retail behemoth that ate North America. I bought a little canvas-bag-thing on wheels to stuff all my extra stuff in. Then I found a tire shop to replace the wheel cover I had chewed up hitting the curb a zillion times, with the one I had picked up in Lancaster. They quickly and cheerfully made the switch and then refused to charge me a penny. I was stunned! How very, very nice they were! I dropped my rental car off at the Edinburgh airport and they didn’t even want to look at it or have me sign anything. I had worried about that scratch on the rear left fender for nothing. The highlight of my flight back to London was a great sweep over the city on a clear day so one could pick out the great loops of the Thames and a few landmarks. It was warm and muggy in London, and I waited in a gloomy alley for a bus to Slough where I had booked hotel accommodation for the night. Early the next morning, I caught a bus to Heathrow and flew back to San Francisco. I was ready to go home. The Virgin Atlantic flight was much better than the flight out. It was a new 747, and since the plane wasn’t full, I had empty seats around me and was quite comfortable. I watched four movies on my personal screen on the seat in front of me and didn’t bother trying to sleep.
Elijah, my youngest son, met me at the airport in San Francisco, and for a few hours I was glad to be home—but from then on, I couldn’t wait to go back. I bought a DVD burner and loaded by 16 hours of digital video tape on to it and burned it all to DVDs. Now, as I finish this account of my adventure, it is a year since my trip, and if I could, I would take the same trip all over again. But alas! There is so much more to see in the UK, not to mention the rest of Europe! Still, my next trip back (I am hoping for spring of 2006) will be to England again, hopefully a hop to Wales, and maybe Amsterdam. Then there’s more of Scotland to see and Ireland . . .
I’ve written a virtual book and you can’t imagine all that I left out! Again, I am sorry about the missing photos. It was hard to keep my mind on photography, as you can imagine.
Hope you enjoyed the reading. If the fancy strikes you and you have the time, I have 16 hours of DVD video that will let you peek over my shoulder from the tip of Cornwall to isles of Scotland. I have a loaner set, so let me know. Oh, and I’m already planning my next trip—December 2005.

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