Aberdeen - Inverness

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Today, we slept in a little bit, until the heavy machinery working below got to us. We had our Scottish breakfast at about 0930 and by 1000 we were packed up and ready for our day trip to Inverness. Our trip started by going back to Castle Fraser as it wasn’t opened yesterday. It opens at 1100am daily. From there, we traveled to the Loanhead Stone Circle for our first glimpse of the various stone circles in Britain. It is a bit hard to explain how it all looked, but it was very interesting.

From here, our trip to the highlands took us to Huntly Castle. This was impressive. The first castle there was made of wood, and subsequently replaced with the one now in ruins. There were some names on the front of the castle, with Stewart being one of them. We couldn’t find any reference to the Stewart kings there at all, but took many photos anyway.

Our tour continued through the Scottish whisky countrty, passing Glenfiddich and the Dewar distilleries, before making fun of the name of the town at Dufftown!!

Our next stop was at Elgin, and a look at the ruins of Elgin Cathedral. This was massive. You couldn’t pass on how big this was. And bloody impressive! In its day, it would have looked so good. So many windows and archways. I reckon the walk from front to back would have been at least 100m and the height would have been 15-20m tall. There were tombstones there and effigies of people above some of them. We wondered about some of the enscriptions on them. Skull and crossbones (meaning mortality), hourglass (meaning a finite life) etc. It seems strange me looking through old cathedrals etc, but there is so much in them, it leaves you speechless.

On to the next ruin. We had a look at Duffus Castle. This was a castle built with wood initially, on a man made mound. Then it was replaced with the stonework that exists now. Unfortunately, the man made mound moved and the castle split in two.

From Elgin, we traveled through to Inverness. I was stressing about the hotel as it was one I selected, but when we found it (easy this time) we were very pleasantly surprised. The room was quite spacious and clean. The reception area and dining areas were very good too, and there was no smell of smoke, like at the Marriot.

Once settled in to the room, we went into town to see where we had to go for the tour tomorrow, had a little walk around to see what was there, and tried to make our way back to the hotel. Our trip into town took 5 minutes and our trip back to the hotel took about 40. Looks like the driver lost his way!!

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