After Aberdeen, the route continued towards the north side of the famous Loch Ness. That meant lots of scottish landscapes and well-preserved modern castles, which in my opinion were less interesting than the ruined ones, as the latters had defensive purposes and therefore were in more strategic locations, like the ones in previous posts…
Crathes Castle
Corgarff Castle
But still it’s amazing the amount of castles in Scotland of different kinds. By the way, in this route, we also tried to visit Valmoral castle, which is the summer residence of Queen Elizabeth. I say “tried” because when we arrived there we realized it was not going to be possible. Lots of people were sitting on the curb of the road when we drove there, and when we asked a couple of policemen, they told us we had to move the car as they were “waiting for the Queen”… So we parked the car as fast as we could and tried to get to a curb to meet the Queen… And in that moment she passed on a Range Rover 10 metre away from us waving her hand like the real royal member she is. I couldn’t take any picture because all this happened quite fast, but I find quite funny that we “met” the Queen in our 9-day trip to Scotland. 😀
After meeting the Queen we went to one of the “must” in Scotland: a whiskey distillery. Speyside is a region full of distilleries, so we just chose one of them: the Glenlivet distillery, which was part of the Chivas Brothers group, and now belongs to Pernaud Ricard.
We realized there that we were visiting the oldest legal distillery in Scotland. The visit was interesting and they show you the way the produce the whiskey and I was quite impressed with the storage of the whiskey. In whiskey production, the cask where they store the beverage is not very important for them, so they just buy used casks from other borboun or wine producers from other countries, including the US and Spain, as they can save some costs there… :-O
The great thing about Scotland is the huge amount of castles in all its land. The remains of Dunnottar Castle is between Aberdeen and Saint Andrews (near a place called Stonehaven), and it is situated on a rocky headland on the coast. We got there when the sun was setting and it was a bit scary…
After the Borders, we stopped for two days in Edimburgh, the capital of Scotland. Nice city, plenty of medieval buildings and streets governed by a well-preserved castle on top of a hill, and hosting the world’s most famous sheep: Dolly. 😀 A nice city, especially if you don’t get rain…
Castle of Edimburgh, hosting the Stone of Scone, one of the most importante national symbols in Scotland.
Cathedral
The school J.K.Rowling got inspired by, when writing Harry Potter's books.
Victoria Street
One nice thing you can find all around Edimburgh are the closes, small corridors communicating streets at different levels and the courtyards you can easily get lost in… some for worse, some for better. 😉
