The Great Scottish Road Trip, Part 1

When we planned this trip, I told Amy that I was mostly ambivalent about where we went in Europe, so long as we tried to focus on places we hadn’t been before. But Scotland was non-negotiable.

Coming here was a bit of a pilgrimage for me. Some of you may know that my middle name is Macgregor—a middle name I share with some other men in my family. That’s the name of the Scottish clan that makes up a significant part of our heritage. (As far as I know, I’m no relation to the Camerons.) And while I’m probably at least as much English, our Scottish heritage is a point of special pride in my family. Perhaps you were at our wedding and remember my dad showing up in full Scottish regalia, including a dress kilt—the one thing I forbade him to wear. He also mounted a Scottish broadsword above his dining room table, regularly attended Scottish Games all over California, and even spent a decade serving as president of the Clan Gregor California Chapter. You could say he was kinda into it.

Despite all that, he never stepped foot in Scotland before he died. Nobody in my immediate family had. Including me, even though I had been to England several times. So it was about time that I got myself there, to finally experience the places so many of my ancestors had lived, loved, and died. The most famous was Rob Roy MacGregor (1671–1734), a larger-than-life character who was both a hero and an outlaw during his lifetime, and has since inspired multiple books and movies, including one from 1995 starring Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange. (If you haven’t seen it, you should…it’s not Braveheart, but it’s pretty good.)

Of course, I had long since watched that film and knew a fair amount about Rob and the MacGregors, both from my dad and from my grandmother, who had compiled meticulous genealogical records and often told me stories about my ancestors. But what had really sparked my interest in Scotland recently was the TV series Outlander, based on the books by Diana Gabaldon. Like most people who watched it, I became a little obsessed with both the story and with Scotland, gobbling up the first three seasons. A tale of romance, adventure, and time travel set (and filmed) in the Scottish Highlands and woven around real historical events? Of course I would love it. And I learned an awful lot about the history of Scotland too. So I couldn’t wait to see the real thing. (I’m not the only one; apparently Outlander, now in its seventh season, has really boosted Scottish tourism, much like Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand.)

To make sure we did it right, we blocked out over three weeks. Of course, we planned to spend a good amount of time in Scotland’s two big cities, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and I’ll dedicate a post to each of those. But I also had to experience the Highlands. And it turns out that by far the best way to do that is by driving. A romantic Scottish road trip, you say? Sounds awfully like the first episode of Outlander. Well, except that we had a 7 year-old in tow…and probably wouldn’t be enjoying any romps in the basements of abandoned castles. Shucks.

I mapped out a loop around the bulk of the country, and it was pretty ambitious. Especially since, for various reasons, we had to do it in only a week. In most places we’ve been so far, we’ve been pretty casual about just showing up and then figuring things out. Not so on our Scottish road trip. I spent hours obsessively researching each day of the trip, plotting out incredibly detailed routes in Google Maps which included every sight that we could conceivably pack in along the way, as well as many extra ones that we never had time for. No surprise, right? I was made for this sort of thing. Poor Amy and Griffin spent an exhausting week as the unwitting victims of Cameron, the Nazi tour guide. Sorry guys!

But even if the pace was a bit rushed and I was a bit insufferable, we had an incredible time and saw so many gorgeous places. Which is why I’m breaking this road trip into two posts, because it simply won’t fit into one. Here we go…

Edinburgh to Inverness

Edinburgh: On the train ride in from England, we’d already been treated to some lovely stretches of coastline. Then we arrived in Edinburgh, the capital. There’s not much to see at first, because Waverley Station, the UK’s second busiest, is tucked cleverly into a gorge in the middle of this hilly city. But the moment you step out…my goodness, what a sight meets your eyes. Never have I seen a city quite like this; let me sum it up simply by saying that Edinburgh inspired much of the Harry Potter stories.

But I only had a brief chance to revel in it as I marched part-way across town to fetch our rental car. Thanks to that heat wave in England, we were already well behind schedule and had to get underway on the first leg of our road trip. So I had to very quickly figure out a new stick-shift car, adjust to driving on the other side of the road, and find my way back across a confusing web of streets and roundabouts back to the station, where Amy and Griffin were very patiently waiting on the curb. It didn’t take long before I had both made a wrong turn and gotten onto a bus-only boulevard (where of course I got honked at), but we soon found our way out of town and onto the motorway. Whew! Little did I know that driving through Scotland would often be this exciting!

Our first stop before we left the ‘burbs was to cave to Griffin’s demands for a vegetarian Happy Meal at McDonald’s. Do they have these in the US? I didn’t think so, but they do in the UK. It was quite possibly the first time I had visited a McDonald’s since I worked at one as a teenager.

The Firth of Forth: Edinburgh is situated on the south side of a large, scimitar-shaped inlet that nearly cuts Scotland in half. It’s called the Firth of Forth, a “firth” being a narrow inlet (related to a fjord) and “Forth” being the name of the river that feeds it. Our first task was to get across it, which for most of Scotland’s history has been a bit of a problem. Luckily, today there are bridges, and we took one of these to Queen’s Ferry, the name of which hints at the previous methods for crossing it. Second pitstop: at a playground overlooking the older and more interesting railway bridge over the Firth.

Townhill: Our final destination that day was a tiny little town an hour north of Edinburgh called, well, Townhill. Few tourists or even Scots have heard of it, because there’s really nothing charming or interesting to see there. So why were we here? Because it was close to the motorway and had the only available Airbnb in the entire region. Best I can tell, Airbnb has not really taken off in Scotland, at least outside the major cities. Perhaps that’s because there was already a longstanding B&B industry in place. It was also the absolute height of tourist season, so everything—hotels, B&Bs, and Airbnbs—was all booked up. This made planning a road trip through Scotland rather challenging, as there were some towns where we almost couldn’t find accommodations at all. But luckily, we had this small, cheap, but very quaint and comfortable house in Townhill for the night.

It had already been a very long day, so I walked down to the only bar in town, which was most decidedly not the adorable sort of Scottish pub you might imagine. I had hoped to grab a cider and chat with my first real Scotsman—and see if I could understand anything they were saying! But I quickly decided not to get chatty with the small group of locals congregated there—didn’t seem like they would find this American tourist very endearing—so I downed my pint and skulked back to the apartment. Afterwards, because the sun was still nowhere near setting, Griffin and I spent the remainder of the evening running around a large local park.

It had been an exhausting, frenetic, and not especially warm welcome to Scotland. Oh well…better luck tomorrow.

Dunfermline: But if it weren’t for staying in Townhill, we wouldn’t have discovered neighboring Dunfermline. I hadn’t even heard of it, but this small town bills itself as Scotland’s first capital. We learned that an early king and queen, Malcolm and Margaret, were married here in the 11th century, and that she built an important abbey which drew pilgrims from far and wide. Thanks to a lot of work over the centuries, it’s still there, and is the burial place for Malcom, Margaret, King Robert the Bruce (you do remember Braveheart, don’t you?), and a bunch of other Scottish royals and nobles. Fun fact: Andrew Carnegie was also born in Dumfermline. Though we had a lot of ground to cover that day, I figured we could squeeze in a quick visit here, and I’m glad we did. The abbey and the park around it are beautiful and chock-full of history, the town is quite charming, and we even found a fantastic vegan breakfast place. I only wish we could have spent more than an hour exploring it all! After a dreary start, Scotland was growing on me quickly.

Falkland: Our next stop was well out of the way, but sort of required for any Outlander fan. It’s an unbelievably quaint little village, a lot like those in the English Cotswolds, which the show used as a stand-in for Inverness in the forties. Some memorable scenes from the first episode were filmed here, and I immediately recognized the spot where a stranger watches Claire in the window of the inn from across the square—you may recognize it as the shot at the top of this post. We were surprised to discover that this tiny town actually has a royal palace right in the middle of town, which was cleverly cropped out of those scenes. The palace claims to have the world’s oldest tennis court, built for King James in 1539 and still in use today. But we decided what little time we had was better spent exploring the town than a palace and a tennis court. We wandered the adorable little lanes and checked out some shops. It was all so freaking cute.

Falkland sits at the foot of some hills and is surrounding by lovely woods and fields, many of them contained with the Falkland Estate. We stopped on the estate on the way out of town to check out a trail through the woods along a stream. But instead, we somehow found our way up to an large, old, empty church that was missing its roof. As we approached, we heard the rather urgent bleating of a sheep which seemed to be coming from inside, echoing off the walls. Rounding a corner, we discovered the source: through an iron gate across the entrance of the church, some inquisitive sheep had stuck his head, and he couldn’t seem to get it out. Who knows how long he had been like that. I couldn’t just leave him, so I helped the poor, frantic creature wiggle it out. My thank you was one last, loud “baaahhhh!” as he clumsily darted off. Add that to my life’s accomplishments: rescuing stupid sheep.

Balvaird Castle: After grabbing a snack at a wonderful farm shop, we headed to our first legitimate castle: Balvaird, built by Clan Murray. We parked in a small gravel lot on the side of the road and wandered up to it. Like so many of Scotland’s castles, it sits deserted and in ruins, atop a knoll on the side of the road. The Scottish countryside is littered with these old fortresses, in various states of decay; many aren’t even signposted, but do pop up in Google Maps, which is how I found this one. The Scottish government and various other organizations are making earnest attempts to protect and preserve these structures, but there’s just so darn many of them! Quite a few are simply fenced off until until somebody can go through and make sure the crumbling structures are at least safe.

In this case, the tower was closed off, but we were able to clamber over the rest of the ruins. We tried to imagine how this place would looked a few centuries earlier when, intact and bustling with people and probably surrounded by smaller wooden structures. Now, it’s just a peaceful relic, slowly being taken back by nature and good as a picnic spot.

(We also tried to do a drive-by of a still inhabited, and much more palatial castle, Blair, but we couldn’t get past the gate without paying an entry fee.)

Cairngorms National Park: Our next stop was a short hike through the woods to the Falls of Bruar. Actually, only I did the hike, because Amy and Griffin stayed behind to play in the stream. They didn’t miss much—it was just a small but picturesque series of cascades through a young pine forest. But I was trying to make sure our itinerary wasn’t all castles and history stops!

We had just entered the south end of the Cairngorms National Park, the UK’s largest. It sits roughly in the center of Scotland, encompassing some of its highest lands, and we would spend the next few hours passing through it.

So far, I had been impressed by how much of the countryside is forested. Official numbers says it’s about 18%—which is 3x higher than it used to be a century ago. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of that is native woodlands; the rest is planted for lumber. Nonetheless, it was refreshing to see so many thick stands of trees, and Amy noted how fresh and fragrant the air smelled. Different than other places we have been.

But as we continued on, the motorway climbed and narrowed, the trees thinned, and we soon found ourselves in a barren and almost surreal landscape. One some hills and ridges, not a single tree grew. There were just rocks. grass, and a few windswept shrubs, occasionally punctuated by a squat stone farmhouse, a dirt road, or a small stream. It seemed a harsh and unforgiving place. I wondered what sort of Highlanders had eked out an existence here, what resources they might have had…and where they might hide if anybody was after them. But it had a stark and quiet beauty, much like the Sierra Nevadas. (Too bad I didn’t stop to snap any photos.)

Highland Folk Museum: We’d been rushing around all day because I was trying to make it to a fairly remote museum before it closed. The Highland Folk Museum is not like any we had yet visited on this trip; its aim is to reconstruct what life was like in Scotland’s past, particularly 1700 – 1950. Laid out across several acres of land at the top of the Cairngorms National Park, the museum is comprised of over 35 buildings, including homes, workshops, stores, a schoolhouse, and more, all furnished as they would have been, and often inhabited by period-dressed docents reenacting the activities of the day. They even have a playing field with an exhibit on the old Scottish game of shinty, which is a bit like field hockey.

My favorite part was the Baile Gean Township, a reconstruction of a small village of thatched stone huts, featured in the video. It’s apparently so faithful a reproduction that scenes from Outlander were shot here (though it certainly wasn’t built for that). I found it a bit shocking to venture into some of these huts. They’re cavernous things, cold and drafty, and almost completely dark, even during the day. The air inside was thick with the smell of smoke from past fires, suggesting that they weren’t well ventilated. Rudimentary beds, cooking supplies, and all your other worldly possessions were jumbled inside. Sometimes even livestock shared the space. It was hard to imagine what life must have been like in one of these, especially during a harsh Highland winter. Challenging, to say the least! My ancestors were much tougher than I am!

Unfortunately, I wasn’t completely successful at getting us here in time. We had less than an hour to explore the place, when it deserved at least three. The Baile Gean Township in particular was a 15-minute walk from the rest of it, so I jogged over there for a quick look while Amy and Griffin explored some of the closer buildings. Only a few docents remained, and they were already closing things up. But it was free to enter, and we were glad to have seen what we did.

Loch an Eilein: Our final stop that day was a hike along what is considered one of Scotland’s loveliest lakes, Loch an Eilein. Its name means “Lake of the Island”, referring to a tiny island in the middle, which (of course) is crowned with the ruins of a castle. We were still high in the Cairngorms National Park, but this area was densely forested, with what seemed like old, native trees, and it reminded me of some of the lakes I’ve hiked in the high Sierras.

For once that day, we weren’t in a hurry, but now we had another problem to contend with. We had enjoyed lots of beautiful blue skies that morning, but now the sky was filled with dark gray clouds, and the moment we arrived at the car park, a light rain began falling. Definitely not part of today’s plans! But we hadn’t come this far for nothing, so we decided to head out into it anyway. Amy bundled up in her winter coat—not because it was cold (it most certainly was not), but because it was the only waterproof thing she had. It earned her a few odd glances from some hearty Scots swimming in the lake! But one advantage of the rain is that almost everybody else cleared out, giving us this popular spot pretty much to ourselves. Scotland is famous for its temperamental weather, and as the saying goes, if you don’t like it, well, wait 15 minutes. Sure enough, the rain stopped after a few minutes as we hiked along the shore to see the island. But we got a small reprieve, and within ten or fifteen minutes, it started pouring, which sent us dashing back to our car.

It was already after 6pm, and though we had hours of daylight left, rain and exhaustion dissuaded us from any further adventures or even stopping for dinner, so we buckled in for the last hour of driving to Inverness. This had been perhaps the most ambitious day of our entire road trip as we covered half the length of Scotland. That sounds impressive, but it was only 140 miles—but even on the motorway, it felt like much longer!

Inverness

After our marathon first day, we settled down for three nights in Inverness. Because we didn’t want to be moving around every day, Amy needed a quiet place to work for the next few evenings, and this was one of the few places in Scotland where it was relatively easy to find a place to stay.

Though it only has about 50,000 people, Inverness is the largest (and in fact the only) city in northern Scotland. Straddling the river Ness (thus the name; “Inver” means river mouth or estuary), the town is a strange mixture of quaint historical buildings and shiny new ones, a real urban planning hodge-podge. (Which is why when Outlander tried to portray Inverness in the forties, they filmed in Falkland instead.) Sitting prominently in the center of town, on the edge of the river, is a castle that looks plenty old, but was only built in 1836, on the site of several previous ones. But even if it’s not architecturally very consistent, the town center is clean and tidy, reasonably charming, and fun to explore. As the so-called capital of the Highlands, it’s a hub for all the tourism in the area, so it’s brimming with visitors like us from all over the world. Which means it’s also the sort of place you can easily find a good vegan meal and a decent cappuccino. Most of the permanent residents seem to live in suburbs that have sprung up all around the periphery.

Griffin and I enjoyed exploring a few of the many parks just outside the city center, all very tidy and well-maintained, where we found several excellent playgrounds and got to mingle with some of the local children. Not that we could really understand what they or their parents were saying. We also discovered the city’s miniature golf course, where Griffin beat me on several holes. Amy’s father will be proud to know the family has finally produced another golfer! (Fitting that we were in Scotland, the birthplace of golf.)

But what I most appreciated was the River Ness. Our Airbnb was only 100 meters or so from it, and we spent a lot of time walking along its banks. Just a bit upstream, the city has stitched together several small, forested islands with bridges to create a beautiful park, laced with meandering pathways. Surrounded by the lazy river, it’s a peaceful sanctuary where you can easily lose sight of and forget you’re in a city at all. Griffin and I spent several hours there one day, him playing in the river, me doing something extremely unusual: nothing.

My only real complaint about Inverness was the killer seagulls. While walking back from a café one morning with a pastry in hand, I was dive bombed by at least two gulls. It wasn’t clear if they were trying to snatch the pastry or were just being jerks, but it’s a pretty weird feeling to suddenly realize that you’re being attacked from the sky and don’t know where the next sortie will come from. Lucky I was wearing a hat! I hurried home, where a quick Google search turned up several reports of people ending up in the ER after similar attacks, and one man being prosecuted after he tried to smash one of these malevolent gulls. I sorta sympathized with the guy!

It was mid-July and the weather was lovely. Gray and overcast some of the time, but when the sun did come out, it was glorious. But at least one of the locals confirmed it wasn’t always that way; he said it had rained pretty much the entire month of June. I also had to imagine it was brutally cold in the winter, here just off the North Sea. At 57.5° above the equator, Inverness is further north than any major Canadian city or Moscow (55.7°), but just shy of Juneau, Alaska (58.3°) and Stockholm, Sweden (59.3°). Which makes it almost certainly the farthest north I had ever been! But that’s the funny thing about Scotland…we were only halfway up the thing. It keeps going. By the time you get to the Shetland Islands, you’re almost to Iceland. (I’m pretty sure that these or the Orkneys inspired the inhospitable islands in How to Train Your Dragon!)

Clava Cairns: We did one day of exploring outside of Inverness. Our first stop, a few miles east of the city, was an ancient set of burial mounds or “cairns”, complete with some standing stones. The oldest date back some 4,000 years, but were actually reused and further built up 1,000 years later. It’s certainly no Stonehenge, nor is it the imaginary set of standing stones portrayed in Outlander, but it’s the closest thing to it in Inverness, and apparently one of the better such sites in Scotland. But cairns like these weren’t treated very respectfully until recently. At some point a local farmer made a road through the edge of the site and moved some of the standing stones because they were in the way. (Not sure why he couldn’t have just gone around it, which seems easier!) And a Victorian picnic party decided it would be good fun one afternoon to dig out the center of one of the cairns. Today, the site is protected, of course, and there’s a small fence around it, some interpretive signs, and a gravel car park. But there’s nobody here supervising or locking the gate at night; just as with all those castles, the Scottish government is trusting you to not damage the site or scratch your name into the rocks.

Culloden: Next we visited one of the most important battlefields in Scotland’s history. It’s well-known to any Outlander fans, which is actually how I first learned about it, because the Battle of Culloden is the historical event which the story (at least the first two books and first two seasons) revolves around and builds to. On this marshy moor a few miles east of Inverness, the Scottish “Jacobite” uprising met the British Army on an April morning in 1746.

What the heck is a “Jacobite”, you ask? (Don’t care? Skip this paragraph.) You may be familiar with the first Queen Elizabeth of England, the one who ruled back when Shakespeare was doing his thing. (Want a refresher? Watch Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age, both starting Cate Blanchett.) She was known as the Virgin Queen and died without any heirs in 1603. Vexed with needing a monarch, the English turned to King James VI of Scotland, her first cousin twice removed, whom they crowned King James I of England (confused yet?). His rule of both kingdoms in tandem became known as the “Jacobean Era”—because James is “Jacobus” in Latin…duh. Notably, both he and Elizabeth were Protestants (and among his many accomplishments was the King James translation of the Bible). Fast forward to 1688, when his grandson, James II of England, was deposed in the Glorious Revolution, mostly because he was Catholic while England and Scotland had become increasingly Protestant. Of course it was about religion, right? From that point on, a subset of Scots known as Jacobites agitated to put a Catholic Scottish king back on the throne, culminating in a series of uprisings. The most successful was in 1745.

The Scottish rebels had gathered an army and enjoyed a surprisingly long string of upsets against the British (detailed and reenacted in Outlander). In fact, they might have even taken London, had they marched on it. Instead, they made the ill-fated decision to head back to Scotland. They were led by Bonnie Prince Charles, the exiled grandson of the deposed King James, whom the Jacobites aimed to put on the throne. After a hard winter and a few other skirmishes, Charlie and what remained of his Jacobite forces were at Culloden, tired, cold, hungry, and unprepared, when the British Army finally caught up with them. It was a terribly swift and one-sided battle; within an hour, around 1,300 men were dead—about 1,250 of them Jacobites. (Or something like that. Nobody knows. Even the Culloden Battlefield website contradicts itself.)

But what is sure is that the battle crushed the uprisings once and for all. It also effectively ended the Highlander way of life, as the British thereafter took decisive steps to suppress the clan system that had fomented the revolt. For this and other reasons, the following decades were so difficult that many Scots (perhaps 70,000 or more) left their homeland in what became known as The Highland Clearances. Many immigrated to the United States.

The Culloden battlefield is now home to an excellent (and popular) visitor center, which presents a very thorough explanation of what happened that day and what led up to it. But first, we enjoyed a great walking tour with an official guide, whose brogue was luckily not so thick as to be unintelligible. Though the battlefield itself is not particularly interesting, it was intriguing to see the lines of red & blue flags erected where the opposing lines of soldiers had stood, and sobering to walk over mounds that may contain the bones of many of those ill-fated Scots. But it’s unlikely that they include many of my clansmen, the MacGregors, because while they were known Jacobites, they were apparently engaged elsewhere when Culloden occurred.

Scotch distillery tour: Though I’m no connoisseur, I do adore Scotch, and for our final stop that day, I had planned to tour a whiskey distillery. Scotland, of course, is considered the birthplace of “whisky”; in fact, the name is derived from the (first word of the) Gaelic phrase “uisge beatha”, meaning “water of life”—which should clear up any confusion about just how important the stuff is here! The first record of whisky in Scotland is from 1494, and we know that King James IV was procuring “aqua vite” near Inverness in 1506. Over the centuries, a robust culture of distilling developed across the country, which still produces the world’s best, most beloved, and most distinctive whiskies, known officially (and regulated) as “Scotch whiskey” or simply “Scotch”. By far the most prolific and famous whisky-producing region in Scotland is Speyside, just east of Inverness, which is home to 50 distilleries, including names such Glenfiddich, Glenlivet, Balvenie, and more. I had hoped to visit some of these, but was dismayed to find that especially during the summer season, you have to book weeks in advance. And for some stupid reason, despite all my meticulous planning, I had failed to do that. So I ferreted out a lesser-known distillery west of Inverness that had three spots left on short notice—except that on the way there, I learned that Griffin was below their age limit, so I cancelled. Oh well. With three more weeks in Scotland, surely I could find another distillery to visit. Right?

My consolation prize was a solo trip that afternoon to The Malt Room, a classy, independent tasting room & bar in downtown Inverness. After sipping some decent mid-grade local whiskies (like a typical Scot, I was too cheap to splash out on the fancy ones), I got myself a fantastic cocktail called a Rob Roy—yup, named after my famous ancestor. (It’s basically a Manhattan made with Scotch.) Meanwhile, I chatted with a young lad next to me about his job as a newly-minted forester, which, encouragingly, is in high demand in Scotland these days. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that drinking whisky by myself at a bar, even a classy one, is a bit…sad. So I soon scurried out of there as if I had something important to do.

Live traditional music: There’s a famous bar in Inverness called MacGregor’s that hosts live traditional music some evenings—which even made it into Rick Steve’s video on the Scottish Highlands. So while Amy worked and Griffin slept, I walked down there solo that evening to hear some…only to learn that the musicians had called in sick. 😕

Despite a few setbacks, we’d jammed an amazing amount into just 3½ days in Scotland. And we were loving it. Scotland has been ranked, at least by one poll, as the most beautiful country in the world (Rough Guides, 2019), and we could already see why. Lush and green, rocky and windswept, full of sparkling waterfalls and dramatic coastlines, endearing and well-worn towns, and mysterious prehistoric monuments, I can think of no place on Earth more glorious to spend a summer. (Of course, a Highland winter would have me singing a different tune!) And though we hadn’t yet spent too much time chatting with any, our impression was that the Scots were just as we’d imagined—which is to say, quite charming and witty, much like yours truly!

Stay tuned for part 2 of our Great Scottish Road Trip!

Meanwhile, if you’re not sick to death of photos of us gallivanting around all sorts of amazing places, you can always see a few more in our Google Photos album…