Highlights of a quick January road trip

In the space of about 10 days Rex and I covered a fair amount of Scotland. Without aiming to do a blow-by-blow, thought I’d stick up some of the highlights – and there were quite a few. Ready? Ok here we go.

We camped almost entirely off-grid, including in one of my favourite spots on the West Coast. It’s such a secluded place there’s no light pollution, and we had a clear sky filled with a full blanket of stars. Rex had popped out the van for a sec and came back saying “You have to get out here!”. We were treated to a crisp winter morning the next day. We sat with coffees watching excited dogs running around on their morning walkies before heading out for our own walk by the water.

Being American, Rex was keen to see some old buildings. Like really old. Preferably fully-original, not restored, lets-see-how-much-is-still-standing stuff. Every castle we went to Rex would wander round saying “Is that the original door?”… “Is that the original stonework?”… “Is that the original information board?”… “Is that the original fire exit sign?”…and so on. We did a tour of Stirling Castle, though to be honest I was disappointed they’d focused the tour more on the Mary-Queen-of-Scots-early-life stuff, which is all a who-will-marry-who drama. I’m way more interested in the sieges of Stirling Castle – particularly the one in early 1300s when Edward I “the Hammer of the Scots” bombarded the castle with “Warwolf” – the world’s largest trebuchet. Go have a read – its a cool story.

We did manage to fit in a fair few castles, including Edinburgh, Stirling, Castle Campbell (which sits at the top of Dollar Glen), Dunstaffnage Castle (which sits on a massive rock), Inverlochy Castle, Castle Roy (which sits alongside Murdo the heilan’ coo’), Loch an Eilean Castle (which sits in the middle of Loch an Eilean). And to see something even older, we hiked up to Dun da Lamh fort, which is estimated to date back to around 500bc.

In fact, the walk around Loch an Eilean was so good, lets have a few more pics from it:

Since we were in the depths of winter, we didn’t see a huge amount of wildlife on our walks. No deer, no mountain hares, no creepy crawlies. Clearly the critters and creatures had more sense than us, and were hiding away in their burrows from the worst of the winter. So we took a trip to see the Cairngorm reindeer who were smugly enjoying the weather in their ridiculously insulated coats. They were pleased to see us, probably because we brought breakfast.

We did a fair few other walks – too many to chronicle here – including one more munro which deserves its own post. But all in all it was great fun and the weather wasn’t too unkind to us. We meandered our way back to Edinburgh, and rounded off the trip with a walk up Arthur’s seat, where we caught a pretty fantastic sunset.