August 14th- Anders

Written on August 11th


We arrived in Inverness Scotland on a cloudy wet day, it was cold for being summer (around 20 C) but a relief for me after a month of intense heat.


My father regained contact with a childhood school friend from Liverpool several years ago and they followed up their emails with visiting eachother. The man's name is Bernard (pronounced without the second "r" and with an english accent of course) and his wife Patricia, but she went by Pat. They are lovely people, proper, yet warmly personal.


In traveling with my parents we decided to visit Bernard and Pat and a great decision that was. Inverness is a town in NorthCentral Scotland and holds the Northern most airport in Scotland. Bernard met us at the airpot and drove us the 100 miles, about, North to Brora which lies on the East coast about 70 miles south from John O Groats which is the northern most town on the mainland of Scotland. Great Britian is one of the few countries in the world that drives on the left side of the ride and is also one of the few countries that measures road distances in miles and yards, i learned from my father that the French are the ones that developed the meter and in a vault with a securely controlled climate there lies the perfect meter bar, and a meter is some fraction of the distance around the world along the equator.


North Scotland is sparesly populated for a couple of reasons, one of which being "the Clearing of the Highlands" in which rich land owners decided that they could be even more rich if they stopped renting to the people who had been cultivating the land for generations and instead grazed sheep, and sheep are still a plenty on the landscape. Every drive consisted of sheep, every scene consisted of sheep, and almost every sound of the countryside involved one of the several words known by our friends in cloudy wool coats. Another particular of Scotland is that 90% of the land is owned by non-Scotts, most of them being English. Many Scotts are poorer people, but a beautiful land they do inhabit.


In not being heavily populated, six million in the whole of the country, Scotland is also not a very developed landscape leaving the land to retain its natural beauty, and it does with a greenery only known by undisturbed soil and much rainfall.


In driving to Dunrobin castel on our first full day in Scotland we stopped to visit the ruins of a 2000 year old home. It was a round, stone structure with the inner floor having a radius of about 3-4 yards, the roof and whatever was over 7ft above the ground floor is long gone and on the upper remaining stones of there lies 1-4 inches of soil covered by lush green grass indicating that this site has been in this abandoned, delapitated state for at least 500 years according to the natural rate of topsoil accumulation. Topsoil takes geographic timescales to rebuild naturally, brown dirt stuff can be made on the ground but the thing that is healthy topsoil either takes a long time or much effort to rebuild, in the USA 2/3 of the topsoil that existed 200 years ago has been lost to erosion mainly due to the agricultural practices of the American farmer, and in China 2/3 of the artificial Nitrogen (a petroleum product) that is put on croplands as fertilizer functions to just make up for the loss in productivity due to topsoil erosion from modern agriculture.


Standing on this grass is a view of the surrounding land and the North Sea, in the distance there lies two oil drilling platforms that took thousands of women and men to build and now only take 150 to operate and maintain, the local businesses did not forecast these changes well and was dealt a heavy blow when the workers sank away upon the completion of the platform. The land view is mostly of grass green as can be from rich untilled soil well saturated with consistent light rain and there is a wee bit of human strucutres like fences, and in the distance over the trees peaks out the Dunrobin castle. Two Lassie dogs were running around downhill from us parallel to the beach accompanied by a white horse with a rider on its back. The water in the sky was ample and visible creating many layers of clouds, some high in continuous grayish sheets, some lower and puffy like mashed potatoes and some reaching down trying to be fog, many were rain clouds but little rain was to fall on us, most of it being dumped out at sea and more inland where the hills push air up creating a meeting of cold and warm air, this percipitation generation process is quite fortunate for us humans as without it rain would be a more rare event on land.


After a good inspection of the ruins and the begining of a midge attack (midges are a small biting cousin of the mosquito) we continued on to the Castle of the local Duke, the family's name is Sutherland and references to them are found all over the burrough along with a prominent 100 foot tall monument on a hill that some locals want removed due to the first Dukes prominent role in "the Clearing of the Highlands," no troubles are found with the current Sutherlands, just the first Duke of Sutherland that is hundreds years now dead. The Dunrobin Castle was fully inhabited by the Sutherlands until 1963 when the 5th Duke died, now the Sutherlands visit ocassionally with the museum presenting 20 of the 189 rooms, the 20 that are presented are the more traditional rooms that include the old dining room, the drawing room, the men's room, the lady's room, the war room, the chilren's play room and other rooms that are furnished like during times gone by, included are furnishings that were added for the visit of Queen Elizabeth who liked N.Scotland so much that she had a lodge made for herself and started a trend for the wealthy English, which along with Kings and Queens gifting pieces of land to loyal Englishmen help expalin the historic foreign ownership of most of Scotland.


Among remarkable objects to see were the books behind glass cases which included titles like "Distinguished Men of Modern Times" and rare printings of classics like the books of Homer. Prenenst also were objects belonging to a Sutherland who became the Duchess of Argyl, which is now a popular brand/design of clothing.


Wandering through this Castle much was presented that could be desired by a person, but for all the Sutherland's riches, in the old days they still lacked many comforts considered basic to the modern working man in the industrialized world; like central heating, a refridgerator, modern medicine, a box that delivers images of sports, nature and news and much more could be listed. It is amazing that in this age of technology and abundance we still lead envious lives of often unsatiable appetites for stuff, we are all Kings and Queens now in physical wealth, as rich as the Royalty of the past.