Day 50: Feeling cross and Applecross

The cabin is a disappointment. Lots of attention to the wrong sort of detail. Nick-knacks of fat bathing belles about the place and dirty sinks, cracked window panes and cobwebs. Definitely not up to the usual standards. To add insult to injury, there is a notice on the gate as you come in offering cabin accommodation for just £20 per person. I have had to pay three times that price per night by the time Airbnb have added their mark-up. I am not a happy bunny and I have said so in my review. 

Air bnb can be tricky when it comes to currency as well. The Swiss couple I met at Paul’s house were similarly disenchanted when they realised that the company played tricks with currencies: Swiss francs converted to Euros and then pounds and charged every step of the way. Never mind.

Only one more night and tomorrow I will go over to Skye to stay with Harish and his wife Clemencia for a couple of days. I met Harish as a client, and did a swap with him for an Enneagram analysis. At the time they were living in St. Leonards on the Sussex Coast but just in time for me, they went to live on Skye. Quite a radical step and I am looking forward to finding out how it has been thus far.

Today, no telephone signal and no wifi at all so I read a novel until I was summoned to the cabin door by someone knocking. Thinking it might be my host I opened the door to find I had a guest.

She made me think about having a very late breakfast and setting off for Applecross. Had I known what the journey would have been like, I may have had a duvet day instead.

What did I know about it?

Several people had recommended that I go.

It has a pub that has won best restaurant food in Scotland year on year and yet was still affordable. It has a heritage centre and an old abbey.

Oh yes and you get to it on the highest road in Great Britain.

Now I consider myself a brave person. Marianne my sister and I walked along a foot wide path 600 foot up a 1200 foot sheer cliff in South Africa with our friend Jenny because she thought we could manage it. Manage it we did but privately Marianne and I thought it was the most dangerous thing we had ever attempted (now you know Jen!).

This was similar. It was raining. I was not driving my own car but a borrowed one with a difficult to find second gear and a dodgy handbrake. It all started off alright.

Until I came across this warning sign.

Sadly folks I chickened and went the long way round. The VERY long way round. It took two and a half hours to get there. I did go through a couple of nice little towns, Lochcarron being one. It had a couple of shops, a string of pretty white houses with roses rambling round the doorways, a lot of small sail boats on the water and a wonderful golf course on the edge of the loch.

Not much else. Sheep crossed the road in front of me with no warning, and twice I met Boris’s cousins also untethered and on the road.

It was steep enough and mostly single track. I hoped the famous Applecross was worth the two and a half hours it took to get there. I was overtaken by six Austrian Porsche heading in the same direction. Another foreign car posse.

Eventually I saw Applecross bay...

And then the village itself. It was very small. It had one shop, one petrol pump and a walled garden somewhere but I never found it.

I did find the Applecross pub however.

And being just one person, they found me a tiny table and I had a good fish pie with haddock and hot smoked salmon.

The Porsche drivers had to wait a bit longer. Apparently this is a trip they do twice a year every year. Why? No idea.

It had taken me so long to get there,  I thought that I would risk taking the short way back over the mountains on the highest road in the UK. One the map they refer to it as The Cattle Pass.

They are joking!! Any cattle with half a brain would definitely pass. It was really scary; hair pin bends and big dipper single track roads with blind summits which as you crested them gave you no hint where the road had gone. It had gone down about 40 foot. Would the hand brake hold? Could I find the second gear? 

 I wished I had someone else in the car for the first time on this trip. If Chris Evans does it for Top Gear someone tell him to drive himself. Like him, I am not the best of travellers if someone else is driving. That road was seriously car sick making never mind basic fear.

The sense of achievement 10 miles on when I came down to ground level was enormous. Now I understand how the mad cyclists felt doing the North Coast 500 from Thurso to Durness. 

However, hire car and I managed it together. Result.

Got back to find the chicken waiting for me with her mate. 

As I got out of the car they both strutted up to the radiator grill and started pecking at the insects splattered there. They’ve obviously done this before.

Day 38: Sandend, Findlater Castle, Cullen and Portknockie

Having caught up with myself and having had a day off yesterday, I can go exploring again today.

Rod suggested I start with Sandend, a village that is a magnet for surfers. I can see why! As with so many of these little coastal villages, the beaches are wonderful.

I noticed some odd concrete blocks in a line on the beach and a local told me they had been put there during the war to impede tank invasion. No idea if that is true but it’s an interesting idea.

Like Pennant and Crovie the houses are often gable end towards the sea crammed together and with washing lines on the sea. .

To one side of the harbour was a wonderful stretch of sandy beach and directly on the otherside, no sand, just pebbles and very jagged rocks, hence the name of the village I imagine.

As someone who lives by the sea in Sussex, I love the colour of the shingle in Scotland . In Sussex its yellow brown and black. Here it is soft shades of grey and pink. Pretty

My friend Maddy sent me a Facebook message forecasting that I would be visiting Findlater Castle. I am a bit castled out to be frank, but rather than disappoint her I went and I was so very glad I did.

The ghastly wet weather forecast has not happened, and the sun was bright and warm as I pootled along single track roads bordered by gorse and golden broom looking for the signs to Findlater.

I was directed to a rough car park area between two fields of rape. Have you ever stood in a field of rape? The scent is sickly sweet and in places the plant is taller than me.

I could just see a strange looking giant concrete looking beehive sort of building in the rape ahead of me. 

Once I reached it I realised it was not a beehive at all. It was some sort of bird house. It turned out to be a medieval Dove Cot or as the Scots call it – a doocoo

Rod, my Tillynaught host, told me that one of his first jobs when he moved to this area from Skye, was to go in and clear years of bird excrement off the floor. In the past, the bird mess mixed with the earth on the floor of the Dove Cot had some sort of chemical reaction which turned it into effective gunpowder!!! I wonder who worked that one out?

Once he had cleared it all, the powers that be, Scottish Heritage or somesuch, concreted the floor so the two substances – earth and pigeon poo - could no longer mix

Why was it there in the first place and why so huge? Inside it there are about 700 nesting boxes arranged in tiers. It was built to breed pigeons and doves in the 16 th century for the inhabitants of Findlater castle and their many guests. The vast amounts of droppings generated by the birds were used to fertilise the fieldsaround the castle and the young birds, known as ‘peezers’ were killed for their meat or squabs, which were very popular in stews and as filling for pies.

So where is this elusive castle?

Following the path through the rape fields towards the sea and I suddenly saw the castle precariously clinging to the rockface and staring blindly out to sea.

It is a ruin and the path down to it looks very narrow and unstable so I admired it from the path.

There were wonderful views from the top of the cliff.

A group of ramblers I had seen setting off from Sandend, arrived having walked along the coastal path.

They could not see the Doocot (learning to speak Scots here ye ken) because the rape was too high.

I was about to tell them about it when we were all distracted by a pair of hare running and leaping across a field just beside us. Cue much oooing and arring.....

By the time I looked back the rablers were doing what they do best – rambling on towards Cullen. I wondered if I could get there before them.

On the way back to my car I passed some outdoor pigs happily bathing in what looked very like s......

Okay you get the picture.

Cullen is famous for Cullen Skink, a haddock and potato soup now known worldwide. I even had some in Vancouver. Originally it was broth made with the scrapings of beef from the front legs of cattle. Why front legs? No idea. Anyway hard times in the early 1899’s left people short of the cash needed to buy any beef, never mind scrapings off legs. But what this fishing community did have in plenty was fish, and their specialist area was the smoking of haddock. So Cullen Skink was born. 

They are certainly enterprising here. They now host the World Cullen Skink Soup Making Championships which was televised by the BBC in 1999 and has taken place ever since. I am now the proud owner of the winning recipe from the World Championships 2013 won by Mrs. Tracey Fuller.

Cullen is like visiting two towns divided by a steep hill. There is the Seatown bit, closely packed by the sea. This is where the fishing families would have lived.

Then there is the upper part with the usual town square where richer families lived.

The skyline is dominated by a massive railway viaduct thanks to the Countess of Seafield who would not let the railways build on her land.

Cullen seems to have found a niche to draw visitors - antiques and collectables

A very good restaurant The Rockpool served interesting and imaginative food and was very busy indeed. I was only able to get a table if I undertook to eat my lunch within twenty minutes when the table was reserved for others. They brought it, I ate it in the time allowed.

There is a visitor centre just off the square run by volunteers. They have a Facebook page called Discover Cullen and are enthusiasts. Sooooo much better than council run Tourist information offices where they just drive you towards council attractions.

They sent me off to the Pet Cemetery. You have to love a town that has a pet cemetery. It is past the harbour where I saw the smallest beach in Scotland.

Perhaps someone should tell them they are only a mile from fabulous, huge, empty, sandy beaches.

The pet cemetery was simply delightful.

Not just your regular cats and dogs buried there either

• A seal
• A beloved Tortoise
• A Hamster
• And several ferrets

It was started by a resident who wanted to bury his dog and it went from there. It is also maintained by local volunteers.

If you are fond of golf, Cullen golf course is also in two parts. You play the first nine holes at cliff level and the second nine at beach level.

The Bow and Fiddle is a rock formation just along the coast from Cullen and has been the subject of lots of photos and paintings that I have admired in galleries all up the East Coast, so I was pleased to get to see this natural phenomena for myself.

On my way back to Tillynaught I stopped at one last fishing village. This was definitely monied territory. The harbour was full of leisure craft and the town very well maintained. Janet is an architect and I was beginning to notice subtle differences in architecture as I drove through certain places.

In Banff it was about curved doorways. Here in Findochty it was about a different sort of wall and window detail.

Rod works on lots of old houses and he told me it is now becoming a bit of a nightmare if someone wants to paint their front door a different colour. Some seem set in stone since the first colour went on. Say a fisherman painted his house the colour of his boat; now that is the ‘historic’ colour the house must be painted. Bit like Florence where you can only use paint off an accepted colour chart.

Heading home passing a village called Fordyke, I saw something really horrible.

In a fallow field, not even a planted one, I saw two washing line structures upon which were hung dead crows.

Who would do such a thing? And why? Is that where the word Scarecrow originates? Does it scare away these intelligent birds to see their fellows dead and suspended like that?

Got back and took lots of photos of my new friends, the chickens, to take my mind off it.