A Day Around Inverness with Julie
I took a break from golf to spend a magical day wandering east of Inverness.
Family encounter at Culloden
We arrived at Culloden Battlefield when it opened so that we could tour the museum and watch the film before our scheduled 10am tour. We had a pleasant surprise of a plaid demonstration: 6 yards of plaid cloth being folded to create pleats and then clothing our “warrior” with the kilt, shield, dirk, and broadsword.
Our group (14 now) breaks into pods and does their own thing, but we still have random encounters along the way. I love this.
Our excellent battlefield tour guide
The battlefield tour was great, largely because of our excellent guide. We also got some great updates on facts learned watching the 1964 “documentary” on the battle.
Split stone
A short drive from the battlefield are the Clava Cairns, a popular site now perhaps because of Outlander. Julie touched the split stone but still remained anchored to our shared time and space. My ancestor also fought the Jacobites so it might have been uncomfortable for both of us.
The cairns had similar passages for sunlight to come through, but unlike the passage tomb at Newgrange these allowed the midwinter sun in.
Beautiful castle gardens
Next up was lunch and a tour of the gardens at Cawdor Castle. Lunch was great! The gardens (and birds) were stunning. Sadly the holly hedge maze is closed to the general public so we could only gaze at it from the outer boundary.
We opted out of the interior tour. We’ve seen a lot of palaces and castles.
Brodie Castle
But that didn’t stop us from touring Brodie Castle! This was a very good tour of what is more aristocratic defensible mansion than castle. It was occupied by a Brodie descendent up until about 20 years ago.
We met up with the whole group in town for dinner at Hootananny, a dive music bar. The food was much better than expected and we appreciated the simplicity of ordering everything right at the bar.
Today we make our way to Fife, with some golf in the hills along the way.
