(Final Scotblog. All others have been edited to the correct dates. Hope you’ve enjoyed it.)

Edinburgh Waverley station combines an interesting location with a lovely name (one I first knew from the paddle steamer – which I first learned of in A Journey Down the Clyde.) The old drained Nor Loch left a valley between Princes Street and the castle, cleanly dividing Old Town and New, and as well as the beautiful but always jam-packed Princes Street Gardens and the sudden slab-sided interruption of the Scottish National Gallery, rails connect the Forth Bridge to the East Coast Main Line. The station itself is a hundred thousand square metres of glass and wrought iron nestling in the valley like a greenhouse for growing trains. Time was, the two long ramps up to Waverley Bridge provided wonderfully logical road access the station (one up, one down) but for whatever reason they’re now both two-way, leading to all kinds of unfortunate traffic-wrangling at the far end and a much less pedestrian-friendly (which is to say, human-friendly) atmosphere at the bottom. I saw Mum hanging out of her train window and sprinted to catch up with it; we all drove to Ormiston in quiet darkness.

Ulrich and Francesca, old friends of my father, live in a converted farmhouse. Their old section of the house (a place of many good memories for me; Easter treasure hunts and mouse-nibbled chocolate, curling up drawing by the big woodstove) is now inhabited by their intrepid hydro-building son Adrian, his wife and their children Lewis and Hamish, and they’ve moved into the building adjoining it, after several years of doing it up inside out. The stone shell is part of a much larger and older complex, some of which is still inhabited by their neighbours, some lying in ruins in the surrounding woods (with a haha!). But the beautifully crafted wooden interior was built, more or less, by their own hands. The lives and livelihoods of almost everyone I know and respect come down to, in the end, shuffling bytes around. These are people who make things, physical things with value. Ulrich only recently closed his sawmill, and has several tonnes of high-quality machine tools on his ground floor; bits of violin wood are stacked all over the house. Francesca keeps their huge vegetable garden beautifully and makes the most amazing, wonderful things from it; I am inspired to grow things in my garden in Birmingham next year. Their children, following in this fine tradition, are currently building a small hydroelectric plant – and have made a really good devblog about it (start from the beginning.)

Constructive Things were done. Nick and I tore up a patch of garden for growing things with wild and gay abandon while Mum helped clear, roof and creosote a new firewood store and Dad murdered trees with an axe. With Hamish (a crossbow-making product of Youtube how-to videos and woodwork-related ingenuity) I made a little launch pad and bottle rocket and fired it much higher than expected (as you may have seen.) Alone, I went down the dell and built a dam – a serious, well made, raise-the-water-level-a-foot dam – in the heavy rain, from the weird assorted building flotsam that have ended up at the bottom over the years. I was very proud of it, but by the time anyone else came down to see the water had washed the best part of it away. Later, when I brought brothers down, Hamish showed us the remains of a mine, moss-covered stone and metal things and gaping black holes to forgotten places, but it was too dark and wet to explore, and we a bit too attached to life and limb. Over delicious soup, Francesca told us about the burglar that had been preying on the neighbourhood, but we didn’t see him at all. Dinnertime conversation was always wonderful. Ulrich ( check those credentials) will talk about biodiversity and the science of GM crops and things in the same effortlessly assured, boundlessly enthusiastic way as I’ll talk about guns, and with about the same level of audience understanding.

On the 11th, I got a call from Dorothy saying I had managed to leave my wallet at her house. Francesca was going to Edinburgh to listen to a concert anyway, so I joined her on the trip out. The Lothian bus stops are roofed with orange-tinted glass, giving everything beneath them the colour of Irn-Bru (speaking of Irn-Bru, it seems to taste much better in Scotland, just as Orangina tastes much nicer in France and tea is… well, equally wonderful in Sri Lanka. Beverages in their homelands – share your stories,) but the buses work just fine when they’re not like bricks in a wall. I rode out to Corstorphine Road again, picked up the errant wallet and walked back to Princes Street, the raincoat I had remembered to bring this time acting as an anti-rain talisman and ensuring that not a drop fell from the sky.

I had been meaning to learn to chainsaw (Dad has been on and off teaching me how to operate an axe, which is all well and good but as a dyed in the wool fa/tg/uy the repeating sword has a special appeal to me) but both he and Mum were a bit iffy about it. I’m inexperienced in the handling of power tools in general, and to go straight to the chainsaw without having a feel for the forces involved is reportedly a bit ill-advised, as if you mess up it cuts your face off. On the last day, we explored his archives (full of weird old machinery and pre-war ephemera, looking for a case of medals and a sheaf of Great War aerial photographs that were supposed to be buried in there somewhere (Ulrich’s grandfather flew with the Luftstreitkrafte) but we didn’t find them in the end.

On the 14th, we picked up Oliver and drove back south in beautiful sunlight, stopping to look over Morecambe Bay and buying dinner from a chippie by a railway bridge. The fish and chips were fantastic, but it felt strange; there were no chipsteaks on the menu, and the accents were Northern, not Scots. In the darkness, sleepy and happy, we arrived home.

Oliver had left us for rehearsals and Stage Crew work for the school production (he’s doing lighting). The day after we arrived in Edinburgh, the school theatre company rolled into town, for their show… at the Edinburgh fringe. What a total coincidence.

The production was “ASBO Fairy Tales.” I wasn’t overwhelmed by the concept (fairy tales – BUT WITH CHAVS AND DRUG REFERENCES LOL) the script (spotty and overly reliant on sudden scene changes and random narration), or the idea of private school kids pretending to be chavs (just because I didn’t think they could do it without looking dumb, rather than from any stereotypes or issues of class warfare, comrade.) But it turned out to be pretty good entertainment; the acting was excellent across the board, and laughs were had. The only thing that let it down was the lighting – an endless sequence of painfully ghastly failures, which left the actors in pools of darkness, blinded the audience, set the curtains on fire, strobed us all into epileptic fits, and at one point caused all the lights to explode, sending showers of red-hot fragments across the stage, drilling into my body and stopping dead my beating heart, OLIVER. Still, I later heard they had totally unusual and unexpected full and near-full audiences for the rest of the week (still running at a loss, as all Fringe things do, but a less crippling one.) After the show I offered to help tidy things up, an offer perfectly timed to coincide with there being nothing to do but hobnob with the actors. We went down a Secret Back Staircase past a long line of nervy-looking young thesps wearing period costume and clutching various props, lining up for the next show. They really rush them through; the turnaround time at these venues would make pit crews envious. Most of the talent seemed to be Mikes: Mike Lovering (lighting, covering for Oliver’s treasonable incompetence), Mike Howie (butt-ugly duckling) and Maik Keefe (mutely suave crack-piper of Hamelin.) It’s odd how well I get on now with people who I just didn’t have much contact with in school. Odd, and good. Mikes are cool people.

After that, Dad went off to Fringe it up on his lonesome while Mum and Dorothy bought Nick and I hideously overpriced, slow paninis and I browsed the fringe guide: trash, gimmicky trash, the same magnificent Flanders & Swann act we’d seen with Ned years ago, lolsorandumXD trash, shows that would have sold out five years ago, a variety show by Clarke Peters (Lester Freamon)! Then, before putting Mum on a train down south for Fran’s funeral, we trotted up the Royal Mile, to look at buildings Paul had designed and be harangued by a million and one assorted weirdos in assorted weird costumes. So thick were the crowds that we got separated, upon which the heavens opened. The weather had been highly un-Scottish, and I was reminded of something our old Glaswegian neighbours would say in response to a sunny day: we’ll pay for it.

We paid for it.

Dorothy had proudly told us that Edinburgh had (according to some awarding body) the best public transport in the United Kingdom. There were buses everywhere, and on Princes Street was a demonstration model of the proposed Edinburgh tram, though due to budget cuts the proposed Edinburgh tram will go from one end of Princes Street to the other about three quarters of an hour. I feel there’s a critical bus-to-street-size ratio, at which transport is amazing and beyond which the buggers are just getting in each other’s way. Most London high streets approach it, delightfully; Oxford Street is just past it, and Bristol has never heard of it. Princes Street is way, way too far the other side. Thirty full minutes in the pissing rain Nick and I waited for the right number in the neverending wall of double-deckers, though it would have been rather less if we’d known any other than the 31 went the right way. Still, we made it back in the end, somehow avoiding pneumonia.

The next day, Dad and I climbed up to Arthur’s Seat and looked down on the city – the winding, picturesque tangle of the Old Town, the orderly grid-pattern of the New, weird spiky spires, office buildings that looked like a scaled-up Giant’s Causeway, faux-Athenian ruins and fortified civic buildings (St. Andrew’s House, Scottish government HQ, combines Art Deco stylings with no-bullshit Scots construction sensibilities, a match made in stony heaven). Tugs guided a big liner into the docks among towering cranes and grain elevators, the tops of the Forth Bridge cantilevers poked up from behind the hills over the firth. Little puddles in the rocks were black with dead midges. We came down on the path less travelled (read: one fumble away from a rockslide) and had lunch in the town – battered cheeseburger. I’ve said it before: I love a place that takes its cholesterol seriously. Then, armed with a memory stick, a street map torn from the Fringe guide, some bus recommendations from Dorothy and the TomTom capability of my new phone, I crossed town to give Andrew a copy of Office, and back again to watch some Fringe shows Dad had recommended.

The map lied to me about where C Central was. It lied. But I got helpful directions and arrived well on time. “The Man Who Fell Out Of Bed”, despite a singularly bad title, was a deliciously 1984-esque (the best part of 1984, that feeling of being totally alone and adrift in a facelessly hostile, invincibly orderly and distinctly threatening society, not the government-is-all-knowing-and-infinitely-malevolent thing dumb pundits regurgitate every time another speed camera goes up) drama about amnesia, oppression, sacrifice and redemption, which sounds like cliche blurb stuff, but better than “man forgets everything, remembers some parts and becomes a suicide bomber because of what he remembers.” The “perfect society” part could have used some more work, and I don’t think it really made full use of the large and clearly talented cast, but there was only so much to go round. Following it, “The Demise of Christopher Marlowe,” a play about the demise of Christopher Marlowe, was sublimely acted and had a truly excellent script. Lots of attempts to sound Shakespearian (or, rather, Marlowe-esque) fail completely, even Alan Moore rang a bit hollow in Black Dossier, but this one worked, and brilliantly. The only weak link was a rather unfitting and slightly feeble Elizabeth, who still came off well in the mail-exchange scenes. Fringe shows I’ve seen in the past (and there haven’t been enough of them) have been of extremely variable quality, but these were both brilliant.

I’d forgotten Edinburgh. It’s one of the loveliest cities I know.

Colin and Paula are old friends of my parents, and their children only a bit older than my brothers and I. Their house, near Newhaven, is linked to Dorothy and Paul’s house on Corstorphine Road by a pleasantly long walk along the Water of Leith.

The path felt as though it had been built by someone digging through my dreams. If it weren’t for the regular-but-unpredictable outcrops of dogshit it’s damn close to heaven on earth. At times it’s a steep-sided valley with fast-flowing water and greenery on all sides, with only the murmur of traffic and the looming silhouettes of viaducts far overhead to remind you you’re in Scotland’s first city. At other times, it’s a straight, civilised watercourse, one storey down from the rest of the town, with flat bridges and buildings on both sides, like a shallower, wilder city canal. The path crosses over the river on all manner of bridges, and sometimes leaves the water’s edge entirely, passing through neat gardens and streets of two-up-two-down tenements or rising a dozen metres to meet a road or circumnavigate a building, swinging you around on a cobblestoned waltz. Everything is green and alive, but the path is clear. Not by the actions of some local authority, but because hundreds, maybe thousands, of people use it, every day. But when we walked the path, the place (somehow) wasn’t crowded; in the depths of the city, you can feel perfectly alone.

It’s got the good stuff: history, architecture, and all sorts of whimsical Fringey things by and sometimes in the water (weird little statues, follies, a rain shelter made of rebar.) The buildings on either side range from Elizabethan half-timbered things real and fake, through the skeletons of old mills (weirs and leats are the only remains of many more) to brand-spanking-new yuppie kennels. Tenement blocks and grand houses tower on the hillsides above. There was a pleasing lack of plastic trash, either in the water or built next to it.

We reached Colin and Paula’s, and chilled in their garden with smartphones, G&Ts and discussions of China. Morag had just returned from the place and had many stories to tell and compare to my parents’ own anecdotes. My knowledge of China in the last hundred years begins and ends with the Sino-Japanese War, and even that ain’t exactly comprehensive. I really should learn more. A buzzard circling overhead was suddenly mobbed by seagulls, making ungodly noises and high-speed passes. One of those things I hear about but don’t see often.

After a huge, delicious casserole, Parents retired to discuss music for the parents downstairs while Olly and I were dragooned into tech support. Being nice, normal people, Andrew and Morag aren’t immensely tech-literate; they were excited at the DWM Flip 3D thing Olly used (which had us both discreetly rolling our eyes; he thinks it’s a gimmick and I find pointless CPU-hogging GUI shite actively offensive. Yes, I’m running on minimal graphics right now, and only the lack of noticeable changes in performance is stopping me doing it on High Contrast White) and, more to the point, their computers were crammed with awful manufacturer bloatware and a few months of accumulated internet crap. I taught Andrew how to use utorrent, installed Spybot and cleared a decent part of the trash off their laptops, while we both (unsuccessfully) tried to work out what the hell was up with Morag’s machine that was blocking Facebook. It wasn’t some sort of residual Great Firewall of China thing, because she could accept lots of other Party-unfriendly content with no problems; it wasn’t a cache or cookie problem, and it wasn’t a browser issue (we tried Chrome and *shudder* IExplore.) They were both still using Norton, but there was no time to fix that. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get Sibelius or Photoshop working, and didn’t have a memory stick with my copy of Office for Andrew, so I took numbers and promised to return.

The warm, self-satisfied glow of having a nice fast functional machine is always worth the frustrating tedium of crawling up a computer’s arsehole and breaking things.

After Culloden, we stopped by Inverness for a mediocre fish and chips by the coach station, and on to the Black Isle (which is a green peninsula), past the seemingly endless fence of a cattle show, spying oil rigs out in the Moray Firth in the slanting rain. At Cromarty town we watched tugs escort an oil tanker out from the deep water terminal, and made a six-pointed trace italienne sandcastle with bastions and ravelins (without the bucket and spade our cottage came equipped with, which had been left in Elgin). In Cromarty, we found a lovely second-hand bookshop/cafe hybrid thing, whose gimmick was having walls and ceiling coated with signatures from past patrons. (The most famous one they could name was “Tolkien’s great niece”, though.) We bought a lot of tea, several excellent biscuits and a little interesting-looking literature, and headed on back to the cottage.

The following day we did the whisky industry.

The Speyside cooperage is one of the few functioning places of its kind left in Scotland, supplying dozens of distilleries, and they’re justifiably proud of it. There are thousands of casks piled up behind the place. The tables and chairs in the cafe are made of casks. There are rain shelters in the car park, made of half-tuns on their sides with little windows and chairs. Made from casks. We got shown around an interesting history of the cask industry (they being the go-to break-bulk container for literally thousands of years), watched an educational video about casks, were shown the cooperage floor full of manly coopers doing manly things, had the general cask-making process explained to us with helpful diagrams and examples of tools and cracked staves.

Casks are an essential part of the whisky-making process, the ageing being what gives whisky a lot of its flavour, and the wood and what it’s previously been used for (whisky is only very rarely aged in casks that haven’t had another kind of alcohol in them) are very important. The coopers we saw were rebuilding casks, which is the main work done by Scots cooperages (their master coopers do actually make casks from scratch on occasion, but they’re bespoke and thus rather expensive.) Used bourbon and sherry casks are broken down and shipped from America and Spain. US law forbids re-using bourbon casks, a law presumably passed due to the influence of a cooperage magnate, or the owner of a lot of prime forest. It looks like back-breaking work; they do twenty, twenty-five of these a day, earning a respectable salary (in the master cooper’s estimation, anyway). Apprentices train for four years, and there was a special area laid out for them, but there weren’t any in attendance the day we came. At the cafe we were given some wine made from oak leaves (me neither) and bought some tablet.

Just down the road from the cooperage is Glenfiddich distillery, which prides itself on being one of the few left with its own cooperage, and brags about its professional coopers rebuilding seventeen casks a day. Glenfiddich was much more slick than the cooperage; a bit too slick and commercial, which is slightly weird given that the tour is free. Once we’d got past the appallingly gushy, overwhelmingly desaturated, slow-mo-blurred-smiling-crofter-faces-littered, one-too-many-twists-on-a-catchphrase video (with headphones in many languages! I amused myself by twirling the language dial around; simple things please simple minds, like having a single sentence go from Japanese to Russian via pretty much the entire Indo-European family) introduction video, we got to the distillery itself. It was a lot like Bushmills – various immense vats oozing exotic odours, spirit safes built according to brass-and-glass sensibilities that would give steampunkers screaming orgasms, funny-shaped copper stills radiating heat, dark, busy warehouses redolent with the angels’ share. I’m pretty sure all distilleries are about the same inside; in Raw Spirit (one of his best books for the simple fact that the plot was dictated to him by the world) Iain Banks tours more distilleries than I’ve had hot dinners, and comes to the same conclusion.

It all makes me almost wish I were interested in alcohol. At the end of the tour they sat us down in the bar and gave everyone sample drams in 12, 15 and 18-year-old incarnations, but they all just tasted like fire to me.

After the tour, parents discussed Highland Games (some were playing on screens in the bar; I always thought caber-tossing was some sick joke thing that didn’t actually happen, like haggis running around, or Baba Yaga, or Swindon) with the nice German guys in our group, while I chatted up with our pretty tour guide (all tour guides in Scotland so far, despite having good Scots names like Donald and Morag, sound more English than the Queen; in her case it was because her dad was in the army, though I haven’t heard any excuses for Culloden Duncan). The day was yet young, but we needed to get Dad back to an appointment with the spinemongler in Elgin. On the return journey, collectively musing over printing and bandwidth and sati-themed nursery rhymes, we stopped at a bridge by ol’ Tom Telford, arching over the turbulent Spey with plaques proclaiming its proud Welsh heritage, and helpful signs explaining why Telford loved his Welsh ironmonger so much, though I can’t remember why now. Thundering pairs of RAF Tornadoes swept overhead the whole way home (carving parallel lines into the sky, until they turned off near Sandford and were lost).

On the Saturday, with Dad’s spine thoroughly mongled, and he in considerably higher spirits, we set off on the long road south to Edinburgh. On the way down we espied a ruined church lurking by the roadside, and explored. There were death’s heads on half the gravestones, among various other highly morbid symbols; the church had no roof, and the weathering inside suggested it had lacked one for a long time; it all reminded me somewhat of Marienkirche in Lubeck (so it was with wry amusement I noted it was called St. Mary’s). Beyond it all, there was a pervasive, distant buzz, like a thousand beehives. Mum suggested midges. If that was true, it was terrifying.

Craigievar Castle was the spitting image of the tower houses I’d been hoping for, save for being pink. It had straight-up walls and loopholes for shooting at cattle rustlers, and an almost stereotypical highland toff’s interior. It was pink. It had a minstrel gallery containing a spindle and a bunch of Civil War-era (ours, not yours, any Yanqui devils reading) lobster-tail helmets, pikes and muskets, all lurking threateningly as if daring you to play them; but it was pink. It had glorious, sweeping grounds with ancient trees, monkey puzzle and funny grey cows. But it was pink.

Really, really pink.

Castle Kellie, our last stop before Edinburgh, was a deeply Civilised country house, brimful of nannyish guides and down-the-centuries ephemera (children’s picture books of the late 19th century look both hilariously racist and Uncanny Valley creepy). Most hilariously, a couple explained (in character) how to Keep Up With Appearances as a fifties family celebrating the coronation, while short on money but attempting to be long on class. It… it was the most unexpected, and the most priceless, moment of the holiday so far.

Crossing Fife we had a perfect view of the glorious Forth Bridge in the dying sun, on the last leg into Edinburgh.

(The word “cask” appears in this post thirteen times.)

The visitor centre at Culloden had clearly had a lot of effort put into it; Paul later told us it cost the National Trust for Scotland a cool twenty million quid. I wonder how much of that went on the building (solid, grey wood), how much on the artefacts (muskets and edges, medals and pottery, woodcuts and handbills, cavalry boots and field guns) and how much on people proofreading every last line of information to keep it as neutral as possible. My dad tells a story from when he was working for Scots government, in which a senior Scot asked a junior Scot, only half joking, “Campbell, eh? Whose side were you on in the Forty-Five?” Getting on for two hundred and seventy years, and it’s still an issue.

All the signing in the visitor centre was bilingual – English and Gaelic – a strange sort of sop to a set of ultranationalist Gaels I wasn’t even aware existed. Unlike the Welsh, the Highlanders seem less tiresomely attached to their old tongue; but I suppose the Welsh had no Clearing, no Culloden. The exhibition was a fairly well set out maze of corridors, with a peculiar design; on the right hand was the red wall, which told the story of the Government, and on the left the blue wall, following the Jacobites. While for the first few metres it seemed to be “pick your bias”, each wall describing its faction in glowing terms, you would then have to switch sides, as both proceeded to thoroughly deconstruct their cause and talk at length about the various defeats, setbacks and foolish mistakes they suffered in the run up to April 16. The last corridor was somewhat dodgy, using unseen speakers to play you audio clips ostensibly from soldiers on the eve of the battle; I preferred Peter Watkins’ version. Then there was a reconstruction of the battle in a room whose walls were all screens, which was stylish, expensive, and in every sense visceral.

After this, the corridors panned out into a huge room full of militaria centred around a big floor screen displaying a top-down RTS style account of the battle, all Time Commanders-style (I wonder if they actually used the Total War engine…)., and then a door to The Place. The field itself isn’t much to look at. Well, it’s a field, what do you expect? There are rows of red and blue flags showing the original line of battle, GPS-linked audioguides that play you a clip when they detect you’re on a certain piece of ground, a great big stone memorial to the Romantic Lost Highland Cause, and a great many small monuments celebrating where individual tartans were gunned down. There was only one memorial to the Government’s troops (who were, in case you didn’t know, as much Scots lowlanders as Englishmen): “FIELD OF THE ENGLISH; THEY WERE BURIED HERE.” Mum got the impression that was biased towards the Government, in emphasising the Highlanders’ failures and making little of the Government’s losses; I felt it was entirely the other way round, with a soulless and inaccurate monument to Cumberland’s troops but a trashy Victorian headstone for where every chieftain and famous clan was heroically escorted from this vale of tears by Brown Bess.

It was a tricky one; the Gaelic, the romanticism and the serious wait before the museum got around to mentioning the actual outcome had me rather annoyed at a perceived pro-Jacobite slant, but by the end I wasn’t so sure. The disgusting Victorian Bonnie-Prince-Charlie-on-a-bottle-of-Drambuie ahistorical romanticised kitsch that no true Scotsman on either side actually believes has left its mark, perhaps indelibly, and even in this most truthful of exhibits there still seemed to be a hint of That Noble Lost Cause; but maybe this is a knee-jerk response I have that objects to any recognition of the Jacobites as anything but doomed, misguided idiots on the wrong side of history.

In modern parlance, you can call the Forty-Five a heroic act of defiant independence against economic tyranny (under Union rule the lowlanders and city folk were prospering, the Highland crofters and smallholders not so much) and religious persecution, betrayed by incompetent leadership. But in that same modern parlance, the Jacobites were a foreign-backed insurgency of a small minority attempting to violently overthrow a legally elected, popularly accepted government, and replace it with an absolutist monarchy. Still sound romantic to you?

The displays were informative, the artefacts plentiful and well-chosen, and the audiovisual stuff of extremely high quality; it’s a serious, no-nonsense account of Culloden in all its brutal detail and desperate futility, and you really could see where the £20m went.

By the by, Bonnie Prince Charlie was a prick.

On the Monday, we took the coast roads to explore Fishing Villages, eating honeybee sweets and mint colonials along the way. There’s lots of geology going on around here, and from down on the beaches you can see the many-coloured bones of the hills in cliffs above.

Principal planned attraction for the day was the lighthouse museum at Fraserburgh. Sadly, to get there you needed to get through Fraserburgh, which is the poster boy for fishing towns that have seen better days: utterly dreary, miserable and dying, all its life and charm replaced by commercial machinery that’s now unused and idle. The museum itself was fascinating, full of those huge multi-piece refracting lenses and a million interesting things I didn’t know about lighthouses, and finished with a tour of the Kinnaird Head lighthouse. They had kept the old tower as spick and span as when it had still been in use (a smaller, more modern, steel and plastic house now shines), and the light itself, all polished brass, thick glass and intricate iron, was so smooth on its bearings I could turn it with a single finger.

Dad had something wrong and painful with his back, needing to see a spinemongler in Elgin on the Wednesday, and Nick and I were both feeling seriously burned out (and me slightly unwell), so the 3rd and 4th were mostly wasted. Apart from a (fruitless; they needed photo ID and their computers were running IE5 or some shit) trip to the Elgin Library, we spent two days florping around listlessly, sleeping, eating and watching The Wire. I’ve finished the second season and am now starting on the third. You shouldn’t really need me to tell you this, but shit’s awesome.

I stayed up to see the purported aurora, but had no idea which way was north or what exactly I was looking for. Apart from a faint green tinge on one horizon, nothing stood out, and I went back to bed.

There seem to be only two things of real interest in this part of Scotland: distilleries and military things. Fortunately, it has an ample supply of both. The Speyside distilleries are legendary and legion; every town seems to have one or two, a whiff of spirits or malting barley will be caught on every car journey, and the distinctive pagodas poke up from glens in the unlikeliest of places.

And the military history of the place is as drawn-out and messy as being torn apart by wild tortoises. Bronze and Iron Age forts, old as the hills they resemble, litter the place; the Antonine Wall is merely the most impressive of the ubiquitous earthworks. Castles and bastle-houses in varying states of tweeness and collapse are everywhere, military roads made by the Romans and General Wade criss-cross the countryside. There are old battlefields here from tangles with the Covenanters and Jacobites, Culloden greatest among them. Radar installations and early warning systems from WW2 onwards dot the hills, pillboxes and tank traps on the beaches here were used in dry runs for D-Day, and, of course, every town has its bronze and marble cenotaphs, some – as is so common – with names from the second big scrap joining those of their fathers who fell in the first. Nowadays there are RAF bases flying Nimrods up over the North Sea, patrolling for Soviet submarines that have been rusting off Murmansk for decades, and flights of Tornados thundering across the sky training for a war they’ll never fight.

Most obviously, most impressively, and quite probably most permanently, is Fort George.

After Culloden, we now know, the Jacobite cause was thoroughly broken and no further battles would be fought on British soil; but it wasn’t that obvious at the time. Fort George was built on a spit of land out in the Moray firth downstream from Inverness with the stated intent of being a fort and supply depot impregnable to uncivilised Highland types. Given apparently unlimited budget, the designer seems to have expected the Highlanders to have the fighting capability of large and seriously tooled up Continental armies. It’s a trace italienne style castle, a star fort (I can make a Trace Italienne Fortifications For Normal People in the style of the Antonine, if anyone is interested. Should I be worried about this becoming an archaic defences blog?) with that curiously pointy design that really only makes sense from above, immensely thick, low walls in geometric shapes to maximise overlapping support and fields of fire: demibastions covering bastions covering ravelins covering artillery-proofed glacis killing-fields.

For whatever reason, the place was insanely popular with seagulls, and there was no single square metre of the fort which didn’t have some… evidence of them.

Nick was coaxed out of the car for a change and frog-marched onto the bastions to Enjoy. There was an excellent audio-guide, which attempted (and succeeded) to give an impression of life as a Fort George squaddie, ie cold, hungry and unpleasant. While I never have time to listen to everything in an audio guide, and always guiltily give up on them halfway through, this was a pretty good one; accounts of the designs and architects (the famed Adams, who used the military contracts to jump-start their civil business) and changing use of the fort (by the time it was finished, the Jacobite threat was long gone, and heavy guns were installed on the seaward walls to cover the Firth from French ships) were mixed happily with an account of a soldier getting a hundred lashes for stealing a handful of potatoes (pay and rations were awful, which has always struck me as an example of total, criminal incompetence in a military establishment.) Much was made of both the historically dilapidated, unmaintained state of the barracks buildings and the endless boredom of the garrison, which seemed strange; surely one is a pretty good solution for the other?

One of those barracks housed the regimental museum of the Camerons and Seaforth Highlanders, whose faithful service to the Crown dates from only a few years after the forces of that Crown massacred their kinsmen at Culloden (no hard feelings) which had the usual mass of militaria and a staggering amount of battle honours. Pick a British campaign after the 18th century, any campaign, and there is a case in that museum about the Scots that killed and died on it. Perhaps there was something wrong with the climate control, or the gear needed to be reminded of Khartoum and El Alamein to avoid falling apart; either way the place was ridiculously hot.

The powder magazine housed a collection of old equipment bought by a local noble, who kept raising regiments nobody wanted and having to disband them again. The masses of India Pattern muskets and pikes, which are ten-a-penny in collections, were joined lots of shoe buckles, cartridge pouches and knapsacks, which are conversely very rare in the field of military leftovers. The bastioned nomshop was great, selling solid, unpretentious food at solid, unpretentious prices, as well as the NAAFI being open to civilians. The chapel, at the most seaward point, was the last thing added to the fort (the budget apparently allowing for holiness as well as impregnability) and included in its stained glass the only known bagpipe-playing angel in Christendom. We spent a good couple of hours exploring and trotting round its endless ramparts, and saw porpoises plorping about in the firth.

On the way back, we stopped at an eco-thing at Findhorn, like a rather less interesting version of the Centre for Alternative Technology, whose green hippie eco-establishment credentials were eroded somewhat by being right next to a massive air force base. Then, near a viewpoint on top of icehouses, overlooking one of the many had-it fishing ports of the coast, Dad went into a Nepalese bazaar (no kukris :C) and bought an astoundingly unflattering fair trade shapeless green-grey top thing.

(Visited: 1st August 2010. Posted: 6th August, mobile internet.)