30 July. Only one campsite this time, this is a short three night trip. Driving through Inverness we stopped at the Co-op to raid their biscuit shelf. We have a new favourite, Abernethy biscuits. We are heading to the northeastern corner of Scotland, Caithness. The landscape is so different to that of the west coast. Flat. Dunrobin Castle is just north of Golspie. It dates back to the 13th century and the original keep still exists within the present day castle. It is one of the oldest inhabited houses in Scotland, still the family home of the Clan Sutherland. Back in ca 1810 – 1820 it was the then Duke of Sutherland who was responsible for the Highland Clearances when thousands of families were evicted from their homes, their cottages burned. Why? So the land could be used for sheep raising. More money in that. We are a bit castled-out so we just visited the garden. We’ve often seen bits of it from the sea side when we went for walks when we lived in Dornoch. They could put more benches in the garden. As we’ve seen before, being able to sit down to admire the view is so enjoyable. I've been to the gardens five years ago but Bill hadn’t been there before. We continued northward to Brora. An important stop, there is a yarn shop. I bought hot red double knit yarn to knit Bill a vest. He chose the colour. The picture doesn't quite pick up the colour. For lunch we drove to Dunbeath, a small village on the east coast we were driving up. The Dunbeath Castle is currently on the market for £25 million. We turned northeast towards Thurso driving through vast expanses of nothingness, sort of cutting off a corner on the map but we've done that bit before. Our campsite on Dunnet Bay, east of Thurso, is next to the stunning Dunnet Beach stretching over 3 km. And next to the busy main road. We were hoping the traffic would die down for the night. (It did.) 31 July. Dunnet Head is the northernmost point of the British mainland. The lighthouse was designed by Robert Stevenson. His uncle, Alan Stevenson, designed the Ardnamurchan Lighthouse on the westernmost point of the British mainland; we have visited it twice. The Stevenson family designed most of Scotland’s lighthouses for 150 years. The Dunnet Head Lighthouse is just 20 m tall, doesn’t sound like much. However, it stands 105 metres above sea level. The lighthouse is automated and all other buildings are privately owned. It is a bleak place, rugged, always windy, no tree would grow there. Makes you wonder who would want to live there. There are some remains of concrete military buildings built during WWII. A cold place for a young serviceman. There is an RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) reserve here. There is a viewpoint and a few plaques about plants and bird life but we were expecting maybe a small visitor center. Across the Pentland firth we could see Hoy, an island in the Orkneys. 1 Aug. John o’ Groats was terribly busy, it’s a tourist trap. There wasn’t space for us to park so we headed towards Ducansby Head. No, not even the Joh o’ Groats Christmas Shop could entice us to look or wait for a parking space. The village gets its name from Jan de Groot, a 15th century Dutchman who once ran a ferry between the Scottish mainland and the Orkneys, which had recently been acquired from Norway. Located in the north-eastern corner of Scotland it is the starting or the finishing point for walks, rides etc between it and Land’s End, the southernmost point of the British mainland, ca 1900 km. The tidal streams in the Pentland Firth, the body of water that lies between mainland Scotland and Orkney, make it a dangerous place for shipping. As the waters of the Atlantic flow into the North Sea and ebb in the opposite direction between the Pentland Skerries they set into motion whirlpools and overfalls. In this area the tidal streams run at a speed of ten knots. (That’s 18.5 km/h. A bit further west the streams run at 30 km/h) We saw some dramatic overfalls three years ago but this time the sea seemed quite calm. Combine the whirlpools and overfalls with gale-force winds you get extremely violent conditions. The lighthouse here was built by yet another Stevenson, David Alan, in 1924. It is 11 metres tall, 67 metres above sea level. The stacks of Duncansby are an awesome sight, they take you quite by surprise once you climb over the hill. They are thought to be no more than 6000 years old as they would not have survived the glaciers pushing against them. Apparently, in 1953 the Atomic Weapons Establishment had proposed a nuclear weapon test on the stacks. However, the prevailing wet weather was too much for contemporary electronics and the ideas was shelved. The nerve! Probably they felt it was far away enough from London. We drove past Castle Mey but it was closed to public. Someone from the Royal Family was staying. The Queen Mother saw the castle when she was staying with friends at the House of the Northern Gate on Dunnet Head a short distance to the west in 1952. She bought it the same year and started renovating it. The House of the Northern Gate on Dunnet Head can be seen from our campsite. A lonely house on top of the hill. Windy. It is now available for renting. How about ten days in December 2024, over Christmas? Just under £12.000. Anyone? It has nine bedrooms sleeping 18 so with extended family or friends not that bad. 2 August. We took the scenic route home. We headed west from the campsite and stopped in Thurso for some shopping. Then we continued along the coast to Tongue. All the way from Inverness to Tongue we had done the NC500, North Coast 500. That’s a route of some 500 miles along the coast of the Highlands called one of the world’s most beautiful road trips. The marketing has been well done but now there are young men in their sport cars racing to do the NC500 as quickly as possible. There are also lots of people in campervans, motorhomes and caravans doing the same but at a much more leisurely pace. Even then there are sometimes problems when the caravans and big motorhomes aka white whales try to do the twisty single track roads and get stuck. We’ve done much of the NC500 before, in bits. On the way to Tongue we passed the Dounreay Nuclear Power Station which started operating in 1955 as UK’s centre of fast reactor research and development. As far away from London as possible. It was decommissioned in 1994 and is now Scotland’s largest nuclear clean-up and demolition project, on-going into the unforeseeable future.
Reaching Tongue we turned south and drove through Altnaharra, Lairg, Bonor Bridge and Struie towards home, stopping along the way for stretching our legs, for lunch and for a cuppa.
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AuthorI'm Piisa and I will be sharing with you my thoughts on this and that, maybe even on whatever. Archives
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