Rosemarkie, Fortrose and Culloden

July 26 

Today we decided to drive out to a little town called Rosemarkie and Fortrose.  There is a walk there called the Fairy Glen Walk, so how could we not?  It was an easy walk in the woods - again, similar to being at home with big trees, and a lovely little stream running alongside the path.  We eventually came to a waterfall, and a bit further along, another waterfall . . . and this is the Fairy Glen.  There are a couple of fallen logs here that have the interesting addition of hundreds of coins hammered into them.  We had no idea why, but we hammered in a penny anyhow because it seemed like the thing to do.

Cottages in Rosemarkie - again, these are so typical
of what we see in Scotland.

More cottages

Yes, it's real!

The Falls at Fairy Glen

The coin log close-up

The coin log again.

coins hammered into a log - with my shiny new penny added

Mama duck and her brood at Fairy Glen

There are "Glens" everywhere!

We went back to the first waterfall, had lunch, and then continued into town to take a look at the beach and some of the buildings in town.  Someone here (I believe it is a local teacher/artist) has taken on the task of creating mosaics with the local kids.  This person designs the piece, and then the kids fill in the design with bits of broken or unbroken tile.  They are all around town and very pretty.  There are a number of old cottages in town that are typical of a lot of what we’ve seen in Scotland, so I put a few pictures in here because they are so different from where we live.  Note the small doorways - some are even too small for me.

Beautiful "cottages"  Note how they are all joined together.

Ice cream truck on the beach at Rosemarkie

Rosemarkie mosaics

Everything you might want to know about Rosemarkie.
What a great name for a town!

The front road at Rosemarkie

More of the Rosemarkie mosaics - beautiful!

Plough Inn at Rosemarkie.  Really old.

Close up detail on one of the homes in Rosemarkie.  All the stones had these
metal disks inlaid into the grout around them.  It looked like the house
was stitched together.  

Rosemarkie has a beautiful big beach on the Moray Firth.  The water was a bit chilly, but there were still kids there willing to dance around in it at the shoreline.  We wandered into a little cafe on the beach and found a bit of information on the coin tree at the Fairy Glen walk: 

Love this - No Disney Tinkerbells here!

Hope I didn't make the fairies mad - I hammered in a penny!

From there, we decided to go visit the beach at Nairn which is also on the Moray Firth and claims to be one of the driest and sunniest places in Scotland.  It started raining about 2 minutes after we got out of the car.  But we did walk out to the beach - the sand was beautiful - very fine and soft like in Hawaii!  Too bad about the rain.  

Huge beach at Nairn.  Too bad about the weather!

So since it wasn’t a great day for the beach, we figured we’d backtrack and visit the famous Culloden Battlefield that we had passed on the way to Nairn.  It was kind of a weird place - it’s a beautiful spot, but terrible things happened there.  It’s hard to imagine 1500 - 2000 people being killed in just over an hour.  The field has been kept as a memorial, and is basically a giant graveyard.  I found myself wondering what is it that drives people to lay down their life for a ‘leader’ who wants power and land.  What if they all just said NO and refused to participate in violence?  And what if we could do that in the world today?

The battlefield at Culloden - looks very peaceful and beautiful now.

The memorial cairn - erected in 1881 by a man named Duncan Forbes,
165 years after the event.  

One of the many "clan stones" seen around the field,
also erected by Mr. Forbes

Leanach Cottage - the only surviving building after the battle.  It was inhabited
until 1912, and has been preserved by the Gaelic Society of Inverness since
then. The barns that surrounded the cottage were burnt down when government
redcoats found 30 wounded Jacobites seeking refuge inside.  The barns
were barricaded, and the Jacobites burned alive.  Man's inhumanity to his own
species is pretty awful.

Tomorrow we head back to England - we’ll take two days to drive to Bath, where I get to meet some Shackell family who are distant relatives.  We’ve been corresponding on Facebook for a few years, but have never met - looking forward to it!