First off is the Fyrish monument, which I didn't bother to actually visit, since it's a long climb up there from the road. It was supposedly built on the orders of Sir Munro, a local bigwig who simply wanted to give the unemployed locals some work, and since they wouldn't take charity he had them build the monument, which commemorates his victorious military posting in India.
I then saw some signs for the "Pictish trail" or something to that effect. Ever the optimist, I decided to follow the signs and after some time on narrow, winding single lane country roads, I ended up outside Nigg Old Church. The church was empty, but open and I took a look around. Its main claim to fame is that it houses the Nigg Stone, a Christian Pictish slab with rich decorations. The stone is probably from the late 700s.
The Stone:
The church. It's often interesting to walk around graveyards, they can tell you a good deal about the local history. I noticed especially the high frequency of monuments and stones dedicated to dead children. Things can't have been easy in these parts in the 19th century.
Note the "dollar" symbol on the pew. Anyone who thinks you can't worship both God and Mammon clearly doesn't know much about the Scots...
This stone is known as The Cholera Stone. The story, as I recall it, was that they thought the disease was due to "unclean" air coming from the decomposing bodies and someone thought he'd seen it come out of the ground. So they promtly plugged the spot with a stone. Yes, they were that stupid.
After Nigg I kept following the signs and drove around on narrow roads. The scenery had a rugged beauty to it and it didn't take much imagination to see kilted or painted warriors running around the hills, sword in hand. This stone is called the Shandwick stone, and is yet another ancient Christian Pictish slab.
The stone is encased in glass:
It's always blowing in Scotland. If you look carefully you may see the ripples from the wind in the fields. It was quite a sight to behold, almost like a river of light traveling over the ground.
Balintore is a tiny settlement on the coast and has a couple of nice sculptures along the seaboard. This one is called Mermaid of the North:
This is the old church in Portmahomack, under which are the ruins of the oldest known Pictish monastery, probably built around 550 AD. There's a nice museum inside.
I then drove into the little town of Tain, where I walked around the local museums for about half an hour. Once again the resident little old lady started cooing when I told her I was Norwegian. She informed me her great grandfather had been a Norwegian timber trader from Aberdeen, and she'd been on a cruise along the Norwegian coast, and it had been oooh so lovely.
I then pressed on to Helmsdale to see the Heritage center there, but it was a bit disappointing. There were some ok displays, but it's too small to defend a £4 admission price, and there was just something about the place that rubbed me the wrong way, a certain smugness in the way the material was written. At this point I was starving, so I decided to find a place to have lunch. The first place I went into looked promising from the outside and had apparently even been featured on TV. However I saw no waitresses inside, and the inner half of the restaurant was plagued by a distinct smell coming from the restroom entrance in the corner. Disgusted, I left the premises.
Fortunately I hit gold with my next try. Let me highly recommend the Gilbert's tearooms, not just for good food, but for the bubbly, warm and very funny people who work there. I think I spent something like an hour and a half in there, most of it in friendly banter with the two women behind the counter, who were also engaged in a perpetual give and take with each other and with incoming guests. They were both hilarious, and I'm going to try and time either lunch or dinner tomorrow so that I can go back there. An additional bonus: They thought, from my accent, that I was Canadian. Close enough for me!
The Marengue dessert. Yum.
A few minutes north of Helmsdale lie the ruins of the clearance village Badbea. The Clearances was a process of forced relocation of much of the Highland population in the late 17oos, and it led to many people leaving the country altogether, migrating to Australia or North America. These poor fuckers got dumped on the steep slopes out by the sea and had to scrape by on thin soil and dangerous fishing. There were about a dozen buildings there and the whole settlement was abandoned after a century or so. It's a nice walk from the main road over the heather and down to the ruins, highly recommended!
The heather - or lyng as they call it. Yes, there are lots of Norwegian words in the Scottish-English language.
Some nice flowers:
A long, long stone fence, the building of which was the main source of income for the locals for some time:
Steep and windy, the location of the tiny settlement was reportedly dangerous for children and livestock, both of which had to be tied down at times:
This monument to the victims of the clearances was raised by a descendant of the villagers who came back from Australia; I think it was built around 1910. Of mild historical interest was that it mentioned that one of the locals had fallen at Waterloo.
This is all that's left of the old stone buildings:
The Highlands... dark, wild and ruggedly handsome:
I finally set off for Castletown, a tiny hamlet five minutes east of Thurso. The hotel restaurant had closed, so I went in to Thurso and managed to locate a Bistro where they mercifully let me in even though it was really half an hour past their closing time. I got me a nice tagliatelle, and the added bonus of two waitresses taking me for an American. All in all, not a bad day!
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