Outlander Tourists and Highland Weapons

Amongst his many accomplishments Jamie Fraser, hero of Diana Gabaldon's 'Outlander' series, was highly skilled with Highland weaponry. Last night those on our fourth Outlander Tour enjoyed trying the weapons for themselves under instruction from Hugh Allison, author and mine of information on the Battle of Culloden.


I always enjoy leading these Outlander tours. The weather has been a bit grey, but a happy group has interrogated salmon fishermen, tapped feet to Highland folk music, seen where the Brahan Seer's prophesies came true and sampled local malt whisky and elderflower wine. (This in additon to the headline activities noted on the website!). Tomorrow, it seems, the weather will be better and we head by Loch Ness to Glenshiel, the brochs at Glenelg and the Isle of Skye.

The Great North of Scotland Railway

Yesterday I was tempted out to walk a stretch of the 'Speyside Way', a long distance footpath, and found myself on part of the old Great North of Scotland Railway line between Grantown-on-Spey and Nethy Bridge. Nethy Bridge Station, terminus for this line from 1863 to 1866, has been a bunk house since the line closed in the 1960s. At one stage, though, there were two Nethy Bridge stations. Potentially a little confusing. The other, built by the rival Highland Railway on the other side of the Spey is still in use and now called Broomhill. As we walked we saw the steam train of the Strathspey Railway pulling in, turning round and heading back to Aviemore.

The two lines shadowed each other on either side of the Spey for about six miles. Competition between the rival companies was clearly intense, yet quality in these massive works of engineering didn't seem to suffer. One hundred and fifty years on and the line is flat as ever; the bridges, untended for fifty years, and now shrouded by trees, stand as a testament to Victorian building standards.

We watched as anglers enjoyed some of the best salmon fishing in Scotland. The Spey, 100 miles long, is one of the 'big four', yielding 10,000 salmon annually. This lovely river which of course gives its name to speycasting, also has happy associations with drinking (Speyside Malts) and dancing (The Strathspey).

And just by Nethy Bridge we passed the very fine but very ruined Castle Roy, a thirteenth century courtyard castle of the Comyns. A good day out.

The MacKinnons of Strathaird

‘An Srath Fhionnghain gheal,
‘S an grinne beus gun smal’

The MacKinnons arrived on Skye in the early 14th century. The clan chief followed about two hundred years later after some local difficulty on Mull where the MacKinnon chiefs had been hereditary Abbots of Iona and Standard Bearers to the Lords of the Isles

A MacKinnon from Canada was in the ancient clan lands on Skye with her husband and family on Tuesday.

We went to Kilmarie and so out to Dun Ringill, a dramatic cliff-top ruin and the clan's principal castle until the later 15th century. Rory got stung by nettles in the 2000 year old doorway, Mark discovered how they barred the door, Deanna found white heather and Denise learnt a little more Gaelic: Dùn ruabh mòr-ghil, the fort at the point of the ravine.

On the way we saw the the burial place of the MacKinnons of Strathaird at Cill Chriosd....


Sadly the clan has not been a presence on Skye for 250 years. In 1746 the chief, Iain Og (that's 'Young Iain', Denise) helped Prince Charles Edward escape to the mainland. For his pains he was apparently given exclusive access to the recipe for Drambuie , but also spent four years on a prison ship in the Thames. His son sold the MacKinnon lands to pay off debts in 1765.

I'll leave the last word to Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull who used to own the land at Kilmarie:

..We'll wait in stone circles 'til the force comes through
lines joint in faint discord and the stormwatch brews
a concert of kings as the white sea snaps
at the heels of a soft prayer whispered
In the wee hours I'll meet you down by Dun Ringill...

Auld Wat of Harden

Cattle graze peacefully in this picture I took last Sunday of Kirkhope Tower in the Ettrick Valley. But it was not always thus. Kirkhope was the home of 'Auld Wat of Harden' one of the most notorious and colourful of the Border Reivers. In 1597 he led a raid on Bellingham in Northumberland with three hundred men and came back with four hundred head of cattle. The Scotts have always dominated the Ettrick and Yarrow valleys and Bowhill, residence of the (Scott) Duke of Buccleuch lies just a few miles down the valley, not far from Abbotsford House, famously home of Auld Wat's descendant, the novelist Sir Walter Scott.

'Not really a castle though, is it?', someone said. In fact these tower houses were the style of the time for landowners throughout Scotland: economical to build, one big room on each floor and high enough so that a fire on the battlements could be seen by the next tower up the valley and so pass the warning if a raid was coming up from the other direction.

Ironically it may be Auld Wat's wife that has left us the best story from Kirkhope. She was Mary Scott of Dryhope (below) known as the 'Flower of Yarrow', and when the larder was bare, she would just put Auld Wat's spurs on a plate and set it in front of him at dinner time!

Can we book a haunted castle please!

Sometimes people ask to spend a night in a haunted castle - prompting a thought as to whether, in this litigious age, they have any recourse if they book a 'haunted castle' and neither see nor hear anything!

But last month a group from Pennsylvania innocently celebrating a fiftieth birthday in one of our Aberdeenshire castles experienced the unexpected...

"Our Ghost was first seen when my friend Ed was putting wood in the fireplace in the basement room ... [He] swears there was a man sitting in the chair, dressed in tweed-like clothing - patches on the elbows, arms on either armrest staring straight ahead. He vanished very quickly.

The second sighting was when my friend Nancy and I were in the room watching the Stanley Cup playoff hockey game .... I was sitting in the chair closest to the door and Nancy was on the couch. Nancy saw a person sitting on the other chair. She was scared, didn't want to scare me so she left to go to bed. The next day she related the story, and she and Ed started comparing the look of the ghost and described him wearing the same exact thing, sitting in the exact same pose, etc.

Nancy is an artist and is going to draw "Angus."We felt no animosity from him, talked to him every time we went into that room - but no one else saw him. We figured he liked hockey and just wanted to hang out for a while!

Nancy also said in her room (the 4-poster which would have been the master bedroom at one time) she heard as clear as a bell a child saying "ma ma," in a whiny distressed kind of way, and when she looked out the window she thought she saw someone in the field above the house, however figured it was a tree. The next day when she looked there were no trees in that particular place.

Others who stayed in the castle said they felt cold breezes and "felt" a presence, never angry or mean - just peaceful and curious."

Out of consideration for Angus, future tenants will be asked to leave a hockey game showing on the TV where possible when they retire to bed!