a visit to the Highlands

It’s a strange thing, being not quite one thing or the other. Scottish living in England, after years of being considered English whilst living in a very insular part of Scotland. But for me the Highlands are home; I feel at one with the huge skies, the mountains, the heather. It’s part of my blood.

We drove up to the Highlands to visit friends and family over half term. I went to Inverness to visit my nanny for her 88th birthday and gossiped and giggled over cups of tea and one too many chocolates. We visited lots of old friends: the kind you don’t see for years and then it feels like you’ve been apart five minutes. We drank gallons of tea and the children jumped in the Moray Firth, just like we both did as children. And London, work, tube trains, and politics all seemed a million miles away.

These houses are right on the beach at Nairn. Aren’t they beautiful?

There’s so much – nothing – there. When I went down to Inverurie to spend a day with my lovely friend Jessica, who moved away from the village last year, we were trying to work out what it is that’s different about the North of Scotland. The air feels different. The sky is – more. There’s just so much space. Traffic is non-existent and the pace of life really is slower. We had our car fixed when we were up there and I was hopping up and down in an I-want-it-done-now fashion, but that’s not how life works up there.
The magic of the Highlands is that you can turn the corner on a country road and see a sign like this:

and be filled with Shakespearian excitement about the Thane of Cawdor (even if Macbeth actually murdered Duncan at Inverness Castle).

Then there is Culloden Battlefield.

When you close your eyes you can hear the yelling, the clash of metal, and the gunfire of the final battle to take place on British soil.

The atmosphere is eerie.
Legend has it that birds don’t sing on Culloden Moor, and I didn’t hear any when I was there.

The house in the photo is Old Leanach Cottage, which is said to have survived the battle of Culloden, and has the heather thatched roof which was common in those times.

Below you can see the cairn built in the 19th century as a memorial to the 2,300 men who died.

Thank you all for such lovely messages about Edward. We all read them and thought as an attention-seeking cattipuss he’d have been very pleased. His sister Bella is, rather unsympathetically, lapping up the extra attention.