OK, we went on a holiday. We’ve been home now for over two weeks, so it’s high time to finish this report.

I won’t bore you with most of what we have done and seen, because nothing is more annoying than being forced to sit through other people’s slide shows, or the e-mail equivalent of them anyway. On our internet site is a holiday report from my dh Rob, which amounts to 34 pages, and even he didn’t mention everything we did. It’s in Dutch, so most of you won’t be able to read it anyway. Some parts of our holiday, though, were of interest to this group, at least I hope so. So bear with me while I tell you about it.

The first week we were in Brittany, France. No connection to DG’s writings there, or it would be the fact that this is a very Celtic area. Standing stones are abundant, and the music is wonderful. There is also the language, which is impossible to understand for almost anyone. Luckily we can manage there with the tiny amount of French that we have J On the way to Brittany we passed Calais, and the area where the Abbey of Ste. Anne de Beaupré must have stood. I posted a picture of the landscape over there once, it’s in the photo’s section. (And Rob mentioned me taking of picture in his Message from The Other Halves, that he sent to you last week.)

From Roscoff in Brittany we crossed to Ireland. Again, a very Celtic country, with a insane amount of traceable history, Neolithic monuments, standing stones and stone circles, gorgeous music and a Celtic second language. The Irish Gaelic sounds and reads much more like the Gaelic we are used to from the books than the Breton kind, but still it’s mostly incomprehensible to me. Once I saw a row of bottle banks, one for every colour of glass. And what do you know, thanks to Jamie I really understood what the ‘dunn’ variety was: it’s brown glass! I think that if I was living in a Gaelic spoken country, I would take pains to learn the language as quick as humanly possible; it’s unacceptable to me to understand so little of official signs and messages on a long term basis. And in some parts of Ireland (an Gaeltachs, they are called), Gaelic is the first language, with English coming in second, So you really need it there.

There are several hundreds of ‘round towers’ left in Ireland, and we visited a few of them. They date back to around 500 – 600 AD, and having seen some pictures before we left home, I thought they might be related to the Scottish broch. (This turned out to be not true, BTW. Round towers are much younger than brochs, they are built with different dimensions and are part of religious compounds. Brochs are used for housing). So I asked about that in the visitor center of Glendalough (an ancient religious settlement near Dublin), but nobody over there knew anything about brochs at all. Everybody was very interested. I guess that the internet must have worked overtime that night, when all the employees of Glendalough came home and googled ‘broch’ to understand what the Dutch tourist was talking about.

After eight day in Ireland we travelled to Scotland, where we stayed for a whopping 12 days. Having been in Great Britain before, we own a very good map of the country, and because I like maps, I had studied it extensively before we left. When you have very good eyes and a bright lamp, you can make out tiny dots with the word ‘broch’ next to them at several points on that map, usually in remote places with no recognizable roads near them. So I had decided in advance that I would try to see a broch this summer. You have to have a bit of staying power to reach that goal – our first two brochs were non-existent, or too broken down to be recognizable, so we had to leave those sites disappointed – but in the end we visited a grand total of five brochs in various stages of (dis)repair. I don’t think there is any broch left that is completely intact, but scientist have a rather good idea what they must have looked like, which is NOT like the cute picture on the site of the Ladies of Lallybroch.

Brochs date back to the period 500 BC – 500 AD. They are about 15 meter across, with a double wall with one narrow entrance to the inside circle. In the cavity between the two walls are stairs, which get narrower when you get higher, until at the top the two walls meet and blend into one. The total height of a typical broch must have been 10 to 15 meters. The space between the walls was probably used for storage and as a hiding place. The people lived in the inside circle, which had no stone roof. There must have been a wooden or thatched roof over most of the space inside the wall, but the central part stayed open for light and ventilation. There were usually several storeys in the living quarters, separated by wooden structures and curtains. It was probably a very comfortable accommodation, as I understand it. We made a gazillion pictures of all the brochs, details and general view, so if my description isn’t clear enough: just yell and I’ll send you some.

In any case it would be a gigantic undertaking to clean an intact broch that had been neglected for say, several generations, so I can understand how some teenager would regret having to do that instead of taking a beating from his father <bg>.

You can’t travel in Scotland without seeing evidence of the Jacobite risings and of Bonnie Prince Charlie – or you must be either blind or absolutely and totally uninterested in history, or a combination of both. So we did see a lot of BPC-related things, including two replicas of outfits he wore during his brief stay on British soil, both very tartan and very ugly. And I was amazed to find out what a celebrity Flora MacDonald still is. You’ll find evidence of her everywhere: where she lived, where she was held prisoner, where she was married, where she is buried, it never ends. I think she is more popular than BPC himself.

By accident we managed to visit Glenfinnan, where BPC first set his standard on Scottish soil, because we passed it on the way to the island of Skye. The nicest thing I can tell you about that place, is that it is used in the Harry Potter movies. Hogwart Express is in fact a tourist train that passes Glenfinnan over a big viaduct that is immediately recognizable from the movies when you see it.

We went to Culloden, of course. At first we wanted to spend a night in the Culloden House, which is a very, very chic hotel now. I had plans to sneak off to the attic, to view the place where Dougal met his end, and I was prepared to pay an impossible amount of money for the privilege of sleeping under that roof. So call me crazy…. Luckily I found out that the original Culloden House burned to the ground in the second half of the 18th century, and that the one that stands there now was built well after the American Revolution. So that saved us a lot, and we slept in Inverness instead.

Culloden Battlefield is a very sad place. Apart from the nature of the moor, which as a biologist I like very much, there is virtually nothing in a very large open space. There are only the clan stones and the flags that indicate the position of the two armies and their leaders. The ground is spongy, uneven and wet, and it is windy. When you walk there, you inevitably get to think how it must have been there, once. The clan stones all have flowers and pieces of tartans around them, like the central cairn with the sign that indicates which battle was fought here.

In summer there are guided tours over the fields, with a kilted clansman who explains everything, but I was glad that we were too early in the season for that. There was too much of the atmosphere of a fair ground around to my taste anyway. Some people seem to think that an ancient battle is like a computer game: fun and sensation, like no one died here, or lost all he had. The more I think about it, the more peculiar it seems to me that man tends to solve differences of opinion by comparing strength and speed and cunning in acts of violence or war, instead of talking about the problem at hand, and finding a solution that is acceptable to all.

The only cottage on the field that survived the battle (must be from that cottage that LJ’s brother sent Jamie home, instead of executing him) was dressed up like a medical station, like it could have been in the 1700’s. Claire must have worked from places like this during the battles she was present at. Very interesting.

Of course we went to Inverness, where I spent my time by looking for Presbyterian churches and mansions that looked like they were around in the 1940’s. I did find some places that sparked my interest, like how it could have been. And the carpet in our B&B was noticeably clean and well vacuumed, must be a characteristic of landladies in that town to pay attention to that. The city as such didn’t do it for me, but at least it was a perfect place to stay for visiting famous attractions like Culloden, the Clava Cairns,  Castle Brodie – did you know that The Brodie of Brodie was present at the battle of Culloden as a neutral observer, to objectively decide who won the battle, like a referee in a sports tournament? – and Castle Leod, after which castle Leoch was modeled. And we went to Glen Affric, which is one of the few places in the Highlands that escaped the deforestation the English imposed on Scotland during the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745.

When Rob en I were biology students in the 1970’s, we visited Scotland on a field trip, and we learned quite a lot about its vegetation and the historic development of that vegetation. After Culloden came the Clearances, during which many Scots emigrated to America, like we all know. They were replaced by sheep, who were much more profitable to the English landowners than the human tenants. To provide the sheep with enough grazing space, and also to deprive rebellious Scots from woodland in which they could hide, big parts of the Highlands were ruthlessly deforested. The effects of this policy are still visible in the landscape today. Very few trees or forests, though there has been much replanting of course. (If this explanation turns out to be a lot of crap, blame my teachers at the university, not me. This is what they told me.) Glen Affric escaped this deforestation, and it is one of the few places that still has the original vegetation that should be present in all of the Highlands, like big parts must have looked like before the Rising. In 1977 we were busy taking stock of the species that grow there, collecting specimens and writing reports about what we found. This year we simply enjoyed the incredible beauty of  the area. It is about 50 kilometers from Inverness, and apart from a small village at the entrance of the glen, there is absolutely nothing except nature. If that doesn’t scare you, you must absolutely visit Glen Affric. It’s gorgeous.

In Edinburgh we missed a lot, although we were very satisfied with what we DID see. Holyrood House was closed for visitors due to the presence in that palace of the Lord High Commissioner of Scotland, HRH Prince Andrew. We saw him drive by on his way to an assembly in Edinburgh Castle, dressed in full highland regalia. There were even a few British flags waving to celebrate his presence in the city, but as a whole they were drowning in the sea of Scottish flags you see everywhere. So no Holyrood House for me, at least not on the inside. Oh well, that gives me a reason to come back – if I should need one.

The Castle itself was too crowded with tourists to our taste, probably because nobody could go to Holyrood. So we only saw the outside of that one too.

We saw a lot of Closes and Wynds, although they are in no way like they must have been in the 1800’s. There is a tour where you visit Mary King’s Close, one of the old closes that constituted the old city of Edinburgh. It is now part of the foundation of a big government building, and completely underground these days. But you get a great impression of how life must have been when you lived in a close during the old days.

We dined one evening at The World’s End. This is the tavern where Jamie and Claire went to fetch a drunk mr Willoughby, right after Claire stepped into Jamie’s print shop when she went back to him in the 18th century. It’s a nice restaurant, and they are very proud of the historic site it stands on. The food was good too, and nobody engaged us in a fight or chased us through the town when we left <LOL>.

In Voyager there is a marked description of the location of Carfax Close, where the print shop was. When you exit the close to the Royal Mile, it’s at the most a hundred yards to The World’s End, walking downhill. Claire mentions it because it is raining, and she has almost no time to get wet. So I stood before World’s End and I counted my footsteps walking uphill, guestimating a hundred yards. To everyone that would go looking for Carfax Close: it does not exist, at least not today. The best I could do to find its location was Chalmer’s Close, which has a brass rubbing centre. I DID find Carrubber’s Close, where the reverend Archibald Campbell lived with his sister Margareth. And near the Tolbooth – still standing and now a tavern and a museum – were archeological excavations going on in what were once the closes of that neighborhood. That is where the brothel of madame Jeanne was located. Need I mention that Rob poked a lot of fun at me for obsessing with these kind of things?

We did and saw a lot more than I’ve described to you. Nevertheless, I simply must go back. There are big parts of Scotland that we did not go to this time. Twelve days is simply too short a time to look at everything you want to see. I may be a few years before we get back, but I have a whole list of places I want to visit then. Not to mention the places I want to re-visit. Maybe it helps that Rob is a passionate scuba diver, and that there are several possibilities to dive in the Atlantic Ocean from the Scottish coast. It won’t hurt to both have a list of must-see-places, don’t you think?