the Highlands, 7

Such an un-Scottish morning! Just about the only predictable thing about it is that it was totally unpredicted! Sunny, mild. A "wow!" day, to be sure.

(very early: I looked out then went back to sleep)

(a wee bit later...)

I eat my breakfast in the sunny quarter of the dining room -- I go back to scrambled eggs with trout and wild mushrooms. And that British soggy tomato along with it. And a rack of toast of course. Impossible to imagine otherwise.

And I contemplate how to deal with this plum day. I had wanted to leave right away. Do that single-track out of here quickly, enjoy myself after. But this weather!

After packing up, I head downstairs, where I encounter Gillian -- one of the few local staff people here. Most others are from far away. The gentleman at the desk is from Switzerland, for example. The wait person at breakfast -- from Australia. Gillian tells me -- we are lucky to have a residence here for workers to stay at. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to fill the staffing needs. 

I ask her if the owners come up to Torridon to visit. She laughs. They live here. In that house by the kitchen garden. They raised their three kids here -- the children went to the local school, along with my two. Then she turns serious: but that school has closed now. And so has the one in the next village. This is a big problem in the Highlands. Small schools close, young people therefore dont want to move here. We used to have coffee shops, things going on in the village. The older kids worked there, their parents managed the businesses. Not anymore. All closed. Only older people and summer people. It's true all over the Highlands.

We talk a little about the Kitchen Garden -- you should go there now. Seonaid, our gardner is there today.

It's a plan!

This is how the day suddenly took shape for me: it becomes all about gardens.

I find Seonaid among pots and gardening paraphernalia. She's the boss here, though she grows things at the pleasure of the chefs -- if they want small nasturtium leaves, she'll grow nasturtium with small leaves -- and of course, at the pleasure of the owners. If they want a rose garden, there will be a rose garden.

We talk gardens and plants and animals that devour gardens. And families and life in Torridon. And trees and fairies. Honestly, if she wasn't so busy and if I weren't a slave to my watch (which tells me I really have to leave soon, or I will over-keep my rental car), I could stay and chat with her all day. She and I have planting stories to share!

Inevitably, we discuss weeds (because I see so few in her beds). She tells me -- dont call them weeds! Call them "plants of resilience!" Sounds so much better! 

Scotland has a less severe climate: winters can be cold, but not as cold as ours. Summers -- not as hot as ours. And of course, they rarely suffer from lack of rain. The soil here is rocky -- and yes, you can complain about that all you want, but I'd take rocky over clay any day. In any case, we all try to improve what's there.

As we look out over her beds, I tell her that I love the cottage garden look. That I would resist shaping the borders into something more formal. She agrees, though of course it's not her call. 

I ask if her children (she has three, two away at school, one at uni) want to stay in the area. She shrugs. Their dad is a fisherman a few villages up the coast. Her daughter is passionate about sheep and wants to work with them once she is done with school. ("I send her to a good prep school and she wants to herd sheep!")  It seems kids here scatter. Out of necessity. Out of a desire to experience something other than Highland village life.

(hmmm... I planted my honeyberry bushes this spring. Most of the sprouted twigs have been totally devoured by the groundhogs.)

That's a rowan,  she tells me, pointing to a small, bushy tree). You can't dig that up. You know that for us Scots, rowans have fairies living in them. One of the workers here, from another country, dug up a handful of these trees. I winced! That's not going to make the fairies happy, poor man. When I had to take a rowan out, I spent some time trying to make the fairies understand that it had to be done. I hedge my bets. Cant hurt!

And now it really is time for me to say goodbye to this place. 

 

 

Exquisite staff. Really wonderful. I'm not surprised that they have so many return guests. (I hear the chatter in the public rooms. I know whose coming, whose returning...) Will I be one of them? Have someone drive me over, wheelchair and all? I'd say this place has half active types and the rest -- well, at least they're not dressed for outdoor life. More like for clay shooting (which you can do here) and whiskey sampling. Lots to choose from. 

 

 

And there is in fact one gentleman in a wheelchair.

(There is also a vast library of very old books. Kind of fun for a rainy day.)

But now I am off. Down that singletrack, all eleven miles of it...

I nixed so many car side trips while here (all for the good -- sticking with bike rides and hikes was so much better) that I decided to do one small add-on to today's return. Instead of driving straight to Inverness Airport (where they are expecting the car back), I thought I'd go just a tiny bit further (on a normal road!) and take a quick look at Cawdor Castle. It's less than ten miles east of the airport and I hear they have great gardens!

Cawdor Castle is a Medieval structure, owned and inhabited by the Cawdor family for some 600 years. That's 23 generations of one family. Impressive. Some of the rooms are furnished with period pieces. I decided to bypass all of it and head straight for the gardens.

They're beautiful. Classic herbaceous borders, in the best British tradition.

(stunning!)

I dont linger too long. The car is due back at 2, it is now 1:30 and the gas tank is running on empty.

Nuts! The gas station is in the opposite direction to the airport. I speed the fifteen minutes to it, fumble with finding the gas door, get back into traffic, lose my way to the car hire drop off, pull in 28 minutes behind schedule. Two more minutes and I would have charged you extra! The Hertz guy tells me. Pure evil! He goes over the car with such exactitude that I now understand why they tell you to take videos of your rental at pick up. Still, he finds nothing amiss. I am car free!

I cab to downtown Inverness, telling the driver how luxurious it is to close my eyes now while he does the driving.

Why stay in Inverness at all? I know that I dont really love this city. (I was here with Ed, before and after our long hike from the Atlantic coast to the North Sea coast.) I dont expect to like it any better now, which is why I found a hotel a little to the side. Along the Ness River.

(The hotel is in fact called the Ness Walk.)

I'm liking the light and breezy book I'm reading (You Are Here, by Nichols) -- it involves English hikers of sorts -- and I imagine an afternoon out with it, in the garden, would be just perfect. But it is not to be...

I check my computer to see what emails flooded my box in my morning of being "away from it all." Oh-oh. The Polish couple staying at Steffi's House? They are without gas. No hot water. No stove. Nothing. Baby born. Two days old. What the heck??

I call Ed. He goes over to get a feel for the problem. Gorgeous, the gas is shut off and the meter has been removed. Bye!

Figuring out what happened takes the better part of three hours. Compounded misunderstandings between the builder and Madison Gas and Electric led to this. Eventually, once everyone stopped saying "it wasn't my fault," we got it straightened out. Very quickly someone sent a repair team to reinstall the meter and turn the gas back on.

By this time it was too late to walk up the shores of the River Ness. Too late to lose myself in a book. Too late to find a bakery for a midday snack (I'm told that every last one closes at 5).

I'm hungry and I want to walk somewhere, so I follow the front desk guy's suggestion of going to Tesco. Fifteen minutes down the river, turn left, it's there. (Tesco is a British multinational retailer of groceries. Sort of like our Costco.)

(the walk)

It's not unpleasant to visit big supermarkets in other countries. You get a sense of how people stock their pantries. I take a long while and then decide on nuts and on these:

They may not be fru-fru, but they will taste like the real thing: sweet Scottish fudge is milky and delicious. I munch it all the way back to the hotel. I enter my room and I hear a knock. Oh, they have turn-down service! Nice...

The maid places something on my pillow. It's a goodnight treat, she tells me. 

It's Scottish fudge.

Dinner is at the hotel, at the Torrish. It's a bit upscale, but there was an inclusive price that was very attractive, so here I am.

Upscale, of course, does not mean good. I'm expecting okay food. I get great food. Scallops -- well, that's no surprise. These are fressh off the coast. You can do a lot to butcher a scallop, but these days most places pan them well. So, well prepared, but not beyond what I would expect.

I then ordered a "Borders free range chicken." A breast with some mushroom prep and a barley risotto.

It was fantastic! I told the waiter -- you can always tell a great restaurant by the way they prep their chicken. It's very hard to do a breast well. This one was fabulous!

And the dessert was good too. Some mix of rhubarb and creme brulee and it stayed together well. Plus I had never had rhubarb served like this -- tasty and still crispy. We have a ton of rhubarb at the farmhouse and my feeling about it was always -- cook it to a wilt, bake it in a cake, or give it away. This one opened my eyes to other possibilities.

My, Scotland has come a long way in its attitude toward food! Sure, I ate in places that aren't exactly pub grub, but they weren't over the top, price-wise, either. And every meal I had was very, very good.

 

It's my last night in the Highlands. I really must come back! There's something about Scotland and especially the Highlands that fits my temperament. As the bar tender at the Torridon said -- the people here are direct and unpretentious. It took some getting used to after France. And of course there are the hills, the purple flora, the birds. The pines, the sheep. The kitchen gardens. All so beautiful...

with so much love...