Invergordon, Still in Scotland...

Thursday, September 26. 10 C.

Holy cow, when we awoke this morning I saw that we were just off the village of Buckie, near Inverness, where I stayed with Moe's husband Ralph's relatives for a week or 10 days in 1960. Good memories!  

We have found that the timings of dinner on this ship are 'late' by our standard at home. We usually have had dinner and cleaned up by 7:00 at night. Aboard the ship here, 7:00 pm is when the restaurants begin to serve dinner. It takes some getting used to.

We went on a coach tour to Dunrobin Castle today. The sky was sunny, actually a lovely day but the temperature felt like early spring. Super It was a Super Day! I never thought that we would be back in Scotland again! We had a wonderful drive through the Highlands today. The traffic was light, the countryside was brilliant, all the crops are harvested and the rolling hills look like they have been vacuumed. Clean and neat as a whistle! Same for the roads and the few settlements we went through.

We have driven through the highlands, a couple of times but then we were unable to enjoy it as much because driving on the wrong side of the road took the joy out of sightseeing out and driving required full attention.

Today's trip was significant because Fellette is a Sutherland, and Scottish as heck. Dunrobin Castle is where the Duke of Sutherland was and a Duke still lives there. The Duke, back in 1750 cleared the area of Crofters, [peasant-like locals trying to survive in the sparsely occupied Highlands] in the County of Sutherland to allow sheep to occupy his land to harvest the wool, booting the crofters out! This time was known as The Sutherland Clearances and made the name Sutherland a nasty name. To this day that is the case with the name, however the current Duke of Sutherland is actually a very pleasant fellow and his ancestors have been for some very long time now.

We spent some time inside the castle but not much as I/we have been here before, and the crowd was slow moving inside, I am not sure if it was with Fellette or Craig in the 1980's or 1990's. The gardens are beautiful even at this time of the year. So, we spent most of the time out there. We also watched a bit of a Hawk and Falcon display. Chilly but interesting out there.

A Good Day.

Good Morning Invergordon!

Yes, a stuffed deer in the entrance way.

It is a very impressive Castle, it has something like 180 rooms, in total.

Upstairs was equally impressive.

The Duke in 1962.

Quite the dinner table, in of course the Dining Room.

That is a Solid Silver Fox table ornament. The Original Duke was one of the the wealthiest men in the world a couple of hundred years ago and the current Duke is still amongst the wealthiest

A view of half of the gardens from the Castle. Cromarty Firth in the distance.

There you have it, from the Gardens.

The Croquet lawn! 

Fellette and the Hollyhocks.

Harris Hawk.

Going through a small but well off village.

The Cromarty Firth, a bit barren.