Some more random blitherings on my trip to Scotland – –
The place is just dripping with history. You can’t turn around without running into a castle, usually in some sort of disrepair. Many of those castles have great stories that go with them. One of my favorites was an abandoned castle (3rd one below) with a sign saying this was the site of the “Roasting of the Abbot Incident”… and that’s all it said. I guess because it was just an *incident*, it wasn’t worthy of explanation (and, yeah, there are web sites that talk about it ).
The movie connection is mostly known. I’m sure some of you have seen “Braveheart” or “Rob Roy”. You’ll be happy to know that those movies are based in whole only partially on the truth. But not so much so as to ruin it all. And a useless bit of information I didn’t know… the Hogwart Express from the second Harry Potter movie, shown travelling over a long train viaduct, was filmed in the Highlands of Scotland.
There’s a special breed of Highlands cow (Heilan’ Coo, in the vernacular) that has long hair. Daughter Person decided they were ‘long haired hippie cows’ who say “Du-u-ude” instead of “Mo-o-oo”.
An addendum to my post on driving in Scotland — as I said, the back roads offered great scenery. There were also little villages, most picturesque, every 10 miles or so. All of them required you to slow down to 30 MPH [side note—I was very glad that they didn’t use some arcane speed system like ‘furlongs per fortnight’]. Most of them had speed radar attached to a sign that would blink your speed at you and add a message to “Slow Down”. Our favorite radar sign, however, was one where there would be a flashing smiley face if you were under 30 and a sad, frowny face if you were going too fast. Girl Child was always urging me to speed up to get the frowny face… little twit.
Rosslyn Chapel, of “The Da Vinci Code” fame, was one of the more incredible stops. I learned there that the book’s author never visited the chapel before writing. There is no “Rose Line” or 6-pointed Star of David in the chapel (the movie artificially added them). But, the architecture was eye watering and I was surprised to find they still hold services there.
More randomness soon… I think I’ll go have some Scotch to ease the night into my veins… [big, cheesy grin]
The Wilds of Ohio 