Blogs from Scotland, United Kingdom, Europe - page 12

This is my third blog about my ancestral visitations to Scotland. I recommend reading my previous two blogs at and before reading this one. My destination today was Tain, Ross-shire, where my Ross ancestors lived. According to my DNA, I'm 36 percent Norwegian, 32 percent English and Northwestern European, 27 percent Scots and a bit of Welsh and Swedish. Linda is 16 percent Scots, but as mentioned before, we share many Scottish ancestors. My grandmother, Anna Elizabeth Weaver's parents were James McGee Weaver and Anna Elizabeth Ross. The Weavers were from Germany with Johannes Weber (5th ggf), a Moravian who immigrated to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s to avoid religious persecution. In this line I found Anna Elizabeth Luther (12th ggm), the sister of the Reformer Martin Luther, making him my 12th great granduncle. My Ross ... read more

One of the positives of coming to the UK during the summer months was to be the fact that we would be escaping the heat in Turkey. Well, there was quite a heat wave happening in the southern part of the UK so luckily our next commitment for cat sitting was farther north in Aberdeen, Scotland. We had heard that some of the trains weren’t running due to the heat of the tracks, but again, our luck was holding out and nothing interrupted our travels north. There also have been railway strikes, but fortunately none of the strike days have been on days we needed to travel, at least yet. We are keeping our fingers crossed that will continue. We had heard that the train ride from Newcastle along the coast was a beautiful one and ... read more

August 23. We retraced our route back to the Scottish mainland then headed south to Fort William for a short visit with Ron’s old friend Ian (who always wears a kilt) and his 96 year-old mother, Margaret. They live in an old stone house that they ran as a bed & breakfast until they retired. From there we drove down to the village of Corran, parked the car and took the ferry over to the tiny village of Ardgour to visit the grave of Ian’s life partner by the parish church. Then through more of the Highlands to Loch Lomond. We spent the night at the Callander Hostel in the charming village of Callander. August 24. Eight miles away from Callander we had breakfast in the village of Doune at a cafe run by two friendly ... read more

On August 19 we drove southeast to visit Abbotsford and Melrose Abbey. Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott, is a stone baronial mansion with landscaped gardens built in the 1800s . The interior is filled with hundreds of the artifacts that he collected (weapons, taxidermy animal heads, suits of armor, a large library, paintings.) Not far away is Melrose Abbey, a partly ruined monastery that was founded in 1136 by Cistercian monks at the request of King David I of Scotland and was the chief house of that order in the country until the Reformation.... read more

To many people on the UK mainland and beyond, the Shetland and Orkney Islands are “somewhere up at the top” of the map of Great Britain. In fact, the Shetland Isles (formerly known as Zetland) are a sub-Arctic Archipelago located in the North Atlantic, as close to Norway as to Aberdeen. Shetland consists of a group of 100 islands with approximately 900 miles of coastline and a population of around 27,000. The Orkney Islands are located six miles north of the Scottish mainland. There are about 70 islands within the Orkney archipelago, 17 of which are inhabited. Both Orkney and Shetland are unique and unlike any other part of Great Britain. They have managed to retain many of their original, unique customs and traditions resulting from their long and eventful history. A Little Bit of History: ... read more