Scotland and the Fringe

 We arrived in Edinburgh . It is packed with people seeing the 3 festivals that take place in august, theater, books and the tatoo.  The last one is a parade of military pipers and scottish regalia . We saw that at the Highlands festival so we are concentrating on the theater. Ok so what I wrote was erased so I will briefly rewrite.  Edinburgh is a city that reminds me of New York in that the big parks are borded with big gothic or classical buildings, like central park. The main stripe is the Royal Mile .  There are crowds of people visiting with 3 festivals at the same time. The fringe is mostly one man shows, comedians and dance. The international festival of Edinburgh is a more established theater troupes and the Tatoo is a military parade of bagpipes . There are 5000 productions here as opposed to Avignon ’s 3000. This above is a marionette show that we didn’t see but the poster was intriguing. Lee and that gypsy. I don’t have too much to show about the thea...

 We left our strawbale house in Findhorn and started down through the highlands to Edinburgh. Below is a window of the house we left. We did a small hike in Kingussie to break up the trip and the trees in the heather were stunning. Do many trees were craggy. We decided to see one more castle called Sterling about an hour from Edinburgh. It was a famous site were William Wallace and Robert the Bruce fought the Englush for Scottish Independence. Mary queen of Scots also spent her childhood here. The castle is stuated on a volcanic outcropping high above the plains. Some of Braveheart and the series Outlander were filmed here. It has been beautifully renovated with colorful gardens.  The sculptures are very naive and full if character. James the V and previous Stuart kings lived here. There were massive feasts in the Great Hall and one in particular was for the baptism of James son where he hauled an enormous boat into the great hall that was filled with fishes and sea creatures ...

 Today we had a tour of the Glenmorangie distillery at 10:30 in the morning!  A little early for tasting whisky! This single malt is made from 3 ingredients, water, barley and yeast but the complicated natural chemical transformations that occur to the ingredients makes a golden nectar. Most of the huge barley fields that are spread over this part of Scotland are for the whisky distilleries, miles and miles of fields! Glenmorangie uses large long necked stills because like a stove pipe  the neck keeps the liquid in contact with the heated surface longer. That’s why their emblem is a giraffe. The tour is followed by a tasting and we compared opinions. The bottles cost about 75 pounds each and we thought that was expensive. The distillery was run by just 16 men back in the 20th century. and they could produce 5 million bottles so think of the profits. There is now one master distiller that is sort of a mad scientist and concocts new mixes in his tower laboratory below After...

Ok it has been a busy two days but we have seen lots of beautiful sights. The weather is holding up real nice for the moment so we went to a gorge firmed by glaciers and full of waterfalls over slabs of rock. It is called in gaelic , but Measrach falls for us. There was much mention of the gaelic name for things. In any case a bridge builder that was the first to use cables on suspension bridges instead of chains, John Fowler , put a bridge acoss the gorge. The Scottish are very industrious and were big bridge builders. Some of the waterfalls. We then took a road curcuit from Garve to Gairlich to Urlacht and Loch Ness . I was a long stretch for a day. There were highlands that looked like big mountains but none of them were over 1500 meters high. The cemetaries are very interesting if you read the tombstones.  Tired we moved on to Urquart a ruined cadtle on the Loch Ness. It has lots of history and St. Columba was there in the 6th century. The lake is well known for the monst...

 We are staying in an eco community in a straw bale house that is very comfortable. Their is a cafe, grocery shop, concert stage, pottery dtudio and weaving studio on the grounds. We can walk to the beach and the bay and the little town of Findhorn. The beaches are long and the water shallow but on the bayside there can be a lot of current.  We took a hike on the beach and saw lots of big concrete squares. Apparently from WWII. The english had secret training on these beaches which resemble the beaches of Normandy before D day.  We watched the saturday visitors enjoying a sunny windless day, ice cream and sand toys keeping kids and parents entertained. Thus is a small sauna that people can use after coming out of the north sea. Ice cream at the harbor. Some of these houses have great refined sculptural details. We walked 12,000 steps and were exhausted so we relaxed in our straw bale house for the rest of the day. To our surprise there were fireworks at 22:00 outside our ...

 This morning was overcast but rain was nit in the forecast. We left Ballanter and took a hike 10 miles from there at Burn O Vat. We saw lots of shades of green, some swans, a young buck, a Milan or red kite, rabbit scat and a herd of deer (in a fenced in barrier which meant they were raised for meat, not wild. For that matter we saw lots of sheep and cows too.) There was also a large stele that was Pict, a celtic cross was represented on it. The knot design represented eternity for them, at least that is what the sign said. It was the last vestige of an old fort. We walked 7 kilometers then went to have lunch in a tavern in the mountains. There are small ski resorts in these hills but most of the land is owned but whisky companies that grow wheat and barley, Glenfiddich, Glenlivet, Glenmorangie, etc.  The Spey river feeds most of these distilleries with the fresh water to make good whisky. We came down from the mountains to Elgin (a lord from here took the sculptures off the ...