Scottish Highlands

It's Wednesday and I've skipped a day, so I'll back up. Yesterday morning at 6:15, we were back in another car and on our way back to Gatwick airport to fly to Inverness, Scotland to visit Willie Brock's daughter and son-in-law on their croft in the Scottish highlands. We'd never met them before but had heard wonderful things about them both and were very grateful for the invitation, especially since they insisted on this week while they were on vacation from their jobs as teachers in the local public school.

The flight took off on time and flew over London. We could see the London Eye, the big wheel that you can board to see London from an aerial view. I knew the Eye was big, but when you see it from the air you realize its enormity. We've been on it and if you are ever in London, you must take the ride. Too soon we were into the clouds and it was white nothingness outside until we were over the highlands and suddenly you could see nothing but brown hills beneath you undulating like sea waves and striped with snow. It was grim and not too welcoming but soon we were passing over farms and fields newly plowed and the colors were just extraordinary - lush sages, velvety dark and milk chocolates, pale golds - I wanted to do someone's living room in those colors! They had my juices flowing. It was beautiful.

When we arrived over the Inverness area which is on the water, the plane went over the water and banked sharply to the left. I felt myself pull back from the window which I'm sure would have prevented me from landing in the water should we have to ditch! But we survived with a very soft landing. For a moment though, I had wished we'd taken the train!

Soon we landed -oops, let me back up a bit and describe the plane. It held maybe a hundred. At Gatwick, we walked 15 minutes to our gate to find out that we would have to walk out on to the tarmac to the plane, half of us assigned to board through the front door, half through the back. At Inverness, we all went out the front door down the stairs and again onto the tarmac and into the only gate. What a difference in the two airports. I saw a woman standing with a sign "TANDY". It was Beth and her John was with her. We liked them right away. She told us she didn't know John's name so she couldn't add it to the sign. Nothing like that for hospitality - accepting someone into your home whose name you don't even know. Our bags arrived immediately right there at the gate and mine had been destroyed! A foot was broken and the zipper torn away from the bag but still zipped and intact. Thank goodness all was still in there -I knew because you could look inside the bag and see everything without unzipping a thing!! We put in our claim and off we went.

The drive through Inverness was interesting - it's the largest town in the Highlands and supplies everyone with just about everything; even all the islands off this side of Scotland come in here for all their supplies. It's not big, maybe the size of downtown Monroe but more dense. Commercial and residential all mixed in together. Lots of the buildings are white, two bodies of water, on either side, Loch Ness at one end (that's where Nessie lives). We drove through and on to Woodside Croft. I was excited that Beth and John live in a croft because crofts had been settings in many of the English novels I had read but I had it all wrong. I thought a croft was a house - small, stone, not too many windows, dark, impoverised; I found out that a croft is a piece of land and the house on the land, much like what I described, is a croft house. To maintain the population here, there are many regulations for building on a croft - you can own the croft but might not be able to build on it unless you live a good distance away - say, 40 miles. A croft can be hundreds of years old; you can inherit a croft. Beth and John bought theirs with a house on it. They had previously owned the croft just up the hill but this one is at the end of the road so they have no traffic in front of them and they have this beautiful view of a strath or valley. The amount of work they have done on it is astounding, plus all the barns. In fact "Willie's Room" was built from the part of the house that was the attached barn.

Strathpeffer is the village at the end of the valley that you can see from their house and is their address. In the 1800s, it was a spa because of the underground sulfur springs and the train ended there at this very quaint Victorian train station but I get ahead of myself.

We arrived at the house and Beth immediately had to go tend to the cows in the barn and I had to go, too, so I unpacked my polka dotted Wellies I had bought just for this purpose and started to put them on. By the time I had figured out how to put them on, Beth had hers on and was at the barn and up in the "digger" - a large tractor with a bucket scoop on one end and a 3 foot long pick on the other. She drove up to one of the round bales of hay in the barn, poked it with the pick, drove out of the barn and over to one side where she could maneuver the tractor and drop the bale into a very large round metal holder open on all sides so the cows could eat the hay through the sides. I was very impressed; it was no easy feat. Her John told me as she was doing this how well respected Beth is by the community because there are very few women farmers. She also is an engineer and teaches all the shop classes - wood, metal, etc. - at their school. The cows are her hobby!

There are about 5 large cows and 6 calves. #17 and #18 were ready to go to market to be sold - more later about that - two more due to go later this year and then 2 more one week and two weeks old. The ones she has named they don't intend to sell, like Rosie and her daughter Posie. But they do intend to eat Freezer Boy! Even though he has a name, that gives you a big clue as to his fate. His mother died suddenly 5 days after he was born and so was bottle fed. Two liter bottles, two at a time. "Slurp, slurp" Beth said and it was gone!

I was glad I had brought my Wellies! I have never seen so much mud or so deep. You can sink up to the top of your boots and walk right out of them. They have 3 labs who go right along with you - Arnie who is golden and big, Sumo who is black and gentle and visits old folks in the nursing homes and Emily a chocolate who never gets enough attention! They live in a very large shed next to the house with an outdoor screened porch and an inside heated room and get to come into the house after dinner for snacks!

Well, although we are finishing up our second day here and I've only described half of the first, I have to go to bed! I've had 2.5 hour naps both days and the jet lag is still talking to me. Maybe I'll catch up with myself tomorrow; maybe I'm giving too much detail but this is my journal, too, so you can just skip some of it if you're bored!