Billow and breeze, islands and seas, Mountains of rain and sun, All that was good, all that was fair, All that was me is gone. (Skye Boat Song by Robert Louis Stevenson)

Tuesday, 2nd June

We left our B n B after a hearty Scottish breakfast and headed off to Edinburgh, with many, many stops along the way. The first was The Fairy Pools, a series of waterfalls and pools of water trailing down a mountain. Very pretty, very picturesque. I think I have said it before, but there really is a lot of water in the Scottish Highlands. Bogs too.

We then crossed the Skye Bridge and returned to the mainland on to Eilean Donan Castle, which looks like a medieval fortress, but was actually rebuilt and completed in 1932. The original castle had stood on the site for hundreds and hundreds of years, but was blown up by the English government because the Clan MacRae had supported Bonnie Prince Charlie. The Jacobite supporters were severely punished for trying to put a Stuart king back on the throne. The new castle is built almost exactly as the original, with much better heating and lighting, and, of course, electricity. The MacRae family still live there. 

We drove on towards Loch Ness, hoping the earn one million pounds by spotting the Loch Ness Monster. No such luck, but we did see several boats travel through the locks in the Caledonian Canal, which joins a series of lochs across the heart of Scotland.

On the way to Edinburgh we stopped for all sorts of photos opportunities: an old stone bridge, a “herry coo” (Highland cattle), Skye Bridge, mountains, snow capped mountains, waterfalls, a whisky distillery, and several scheduled and unscheduled toilet breaks.

We were in the bus from 9:00 am and arrived in Edinburgh at 8:10.

We were nervous before the trip, as three days with 25 other strangers could have been disastrous. However it wasn’t too bad. We covered most of Skye and a vast areas of the Scottish Highlands and saw a lot more and learnt a lot more about Scottish history than we would have on our own. Scottish history, as Irish history, is fairly torrid and mostly about glorious defeats in battle and subsequent retribution.

We booked into our Edinburgh hotel, a laneway from the Royal Mile, and strolled up to the castle as we ate some greasy fish and chips for dinner. A bit of a change from the recent previous meals. No langoustine in sight. Our  first impressions of Edinburgh are WOW! We only have one full day here. I thought our bus tour would return earlier than 8 pm, so did everyone else, who were scrambling to make changes to their dinner reservations and check-ins when the driver told us our ETA.