Scotland 4 - Kilmarten Proper

This is what I expected when I thought of Scotland. A breakfast of eggs, bacon, and haggis, and off into the drizzly rain to look at old rocks. I love this shite. 

We chose to spend the night at Kilmartin, which is a one-bar / one restaurant / one hotel town, and all of those are the same business.  But this middle of nowhere is also the middle of Neolithic Scotland, with a valley full of cairns and standing stones. 

Our first site was a mere mile down the road, where we hiked out to the Nether Largie Standing stones - A large X in the center of the valley (it's not that large a valley) that map out to astronomical features. But mostly, who doesn't love a good standing stone, especially if they are etched with random circles during pre-history? Old shit is automatically cool. And to make things better, Ada was wandering around in a cute pink rain-jacket like a little fae babe. Her parents wouldn't let me put her in the cairns to see if the fair folk would swap her with a changeling, but I asked.   Continuing across the valley to the far side (it's not that large a valley) we found the stone rings of Nether Largie and Temple Wood - two flat circles filled with several layers of fist-sized stones.  This surrounded a cyst (pronounced Kyst and linguistically related to 'chest') - which is a stone box you probably leave bodies in. 

Probably, because in the 4000 [to 5000] years that they've been in here, any bodies that were there were dissolved by the acidic water. Why so acidic? Because this entire valley became a peat bog! This is actually why these stones are so well preserved - three millennia of being hidden by peat protected all these structures until the 1800s, when they started harvesting it all.

I took a time-lapse of our hotel (and hopefully some cool clouds) as we checked out a Cairn. A cairn is really just a massive pile of rocks (probably surrounding a few cysts or one massive cyst), sort of an evolved stone-circle. This cairn was cool because it had been rebuilt after excavaction, and after thousands of years you could once again enter the cairn.  Then a soggy hike through wet grass back to grab my camera off the fence-post I stuck it to, and back to the van.

Second spot was another mile down the road, to Dunchcraigaig, which is a pretty meh cairn but is on the same trail as Ballymeanoch - a set of 6 standing stones in two rows. Some good stones, up to 15' tall which means it's gotta be 20? [yup] overall.  To side of this was a small stone henge, the only Scotland, but diminutive when compared to the rest of the standing stones. And then it started raining... Well it had been raining, kinda, but the previous rain had been the kind we could collectively pretend wasn't happening. This new rain wasn't torents, but it was enough to encourage us on our way - to the last few stones on the far side of the field! And then back to the car for...

Museum time! Well, really, it was bathroom-diaper time, but that meant museum time! A quick two-mile drive, I had my brother take the wheel for an easy low-stakes introduction. The museum was pretty crowded, so we went to the café for lunch. Standard café food (panini's, muffins, etc), but with an amazing view of a cairn we hadn't seen yet, in a pasture full of sheep. Truly idyllic.  Plus, we had an Irn Brew. "Scotland's other national drink", Irn Bru tastes like Dr-Pepper with a disgusting bubblegum aftertaste. The health inspectors made them change the name from Iron-Brew since there's no iron in it, but apparently had no problem with it being full of caffeine / artificial colors and flavors, and both sugar and aspartame. 0/10, Highly recommend trying it once, preferably with a group where you can peer pressure others to partake. 

After lunch the nap-clock said we had about 40 minutes before the meltdown, so we speed-ran the museum (good exhibits on the layout of the relics and the artifacts found within, but my main goal was getting a picture of a cairn with sheep. On the way down to the pasture Ada reached over for me, so Ethan shouldered out of the sling(sort of a bandolier for baby-butts) I ended up carrying her down the stairs, and then just continued carrying her into a heard of sheep! She called them dogs, but she did baa back at them, so we're getting there. I had to curve in behind them and herd towards being in frame, and Ada loved it. The ram did not love it, so he and I kept careful watch on one another but ultimately decided not to bash our faces into each other. We were both considering it.

Back up the hill (it's so much warmer when you're carrying toddlers up staircases) and we loaded up into the car for our trip to Ballachulish / Glencoe). My brother, emboldened and unsatisfied by his first few miles, jumped in the driver's seat, so I took up the navigation / rally notes / fender-watcher position. Much of the ride was pretty easy, and it's amazing how much more you can see when you're not fixated on lane-position. The views are spectacular on these drives! Castles, flocks of sheep, lochs and bays and coves and rivers... But about the time I was worried Ethan wasn't going to get the whole Scottish driving experience, GPS directed us onto some single-track. The road looked like a narrow driveway, only it had "Passing Places" every 100 yards or so. My mom was stressed, but the road was pretty empty, and we only had 5 or 6 miles to cover on this before we returned to civilization. The views were even better, and the few passes we had went rather well, until the last pass - we nailed a pothole in the roadside gravel, and launched a hubcap deep into the brambles.

Our house in Ballachulish is pretty great. Huge living room attached to the kitchen, and 4 bedrooms / 3 bathrooms. Why so many? Because Adam/Danni/Sage/Oli get here today! We settled in, started laundry, and sent off a party for groceries - before we knew it, another Black Mercedes 9 minivan rolled into the drive! They look beat. Apparently someone was so excited to see Grammy and Pops (aww) that there was almost no sleeping on the plane. Except for Oliver, who is a champ that can and will sleep anywhere.

Had an easy home-cooked meal of pasta catching up on everything while the children slowly fell apart. It is clear they have all had busy days and are at the ends of their ropes, so we humor their keens while continuing the conversation, utterly unfazed.

Blogging now between occasional screams from one bedroom or another.  Tomorrow: more hiking, more rain, and probably more screaming!

So cute when she's not screaming though....