Saturday. Our last day in the “proper” Highlands! Packed up and left Tain mid-morning and headed back south. We took back roads. They are far more sceneic and interesting than the motorways. Drove past Inverness and on narrow country roads through the Caringorms National Park and the famous Grampian Mountains.

Spectacular mountains. Some of them had huge basins of snow near their summits. Their bald, round domes rose high in the sky and swooped down low into deep valleys or glens. Rolling on and on. Their patchwork colours of green, brown and bronze everchanging as sunlight and the shadows of the clouds chased each other over the landscape. I’ve never seen any other landscape like it anywhere else that I’ve been. (Not that I’m a widely travelled person!) Sometimes we would have to stop to let the sheep grazing by the side of the road wander across.  Drove past a couple of snow ski lifts that obviously would get a lot of use in the winter time.  There’s hardly any traffic.

Snow on the far mountains, heather in foreground!

Screeched to a stop and pulled over when we spied an interesting old, grey, stone building away along in the glen floor, between the mountains. We walked along a sheep’s track beside a burbling burn (stream) to explore it further. It was the remains of an old manganese mine from the 1800s.

Before that, iron had been mined in these mountains in the 1700s. Now the building is a summer house for sheep. They skedaddled protesingly out of the building as we walked up to it. (Sheep here, by the way, look just like Shaun the Sheep!)

Shaun the sheep and friends

In the 1700s, this glen was also one of the smuggling routes for the illicit whisky trade that was rife. But now it’s such a peaceful, quiet, remote place with nothing to disturb it but the sounds of sheep bleating and the burn endlessly running along. The purple heather is starting to bloom, and in a couple of weeks, the hills will be purple covered.

Heather!

We found a picnic table there and ate our picnic lunch. A perfect picnic. No flies or ants. Just tranquility!

As we drove into Perthshire, the country changed and become more sedate and calm. Rolling green hills covered with trees, interspersed with green fields of wheat or potatoes. GPS sent us up the garden path to the wrong house again. I have to say that I am quite sure it was GPS’s fault again! But fortunately no one was home. And it didn’t look “right”, so we got back in the car and looked further. And round the corner we found it.

In the middle of fields, no other houses around it. An old Georgian house next to a huge old grey stone church building surrounded by graves. The house is called The Old Manse. Alex and Esther and their two children are German, but living in Scotland for nearly 20 years. So welcoming and showed us to our double room, looking out onto the church.

We needed to stretch our legs after several hours in the car, so walked outside and on the other side of the church was a path leading down to the Loch of Cluny. Three teenagers there fishing but hadn’t caught anything. Small yellow waterlilies on the loch. And out in the middle a very tiny island, and (apparently) behind all the trees on the island, the ruins of a tiny, tiny house or castle. We tried to walk round the Loch, but the shoulder-high nettles defeated us.  Nettles really sting! So ended up just walking along the country roads nearby.

River Tay on a summer’s evening

We drove over narrow, winding country roads to the nearby village of Dunkeld and Birnam and had a nice pub tea at the Birnam Inn there. The sun was shining brightly, so we walked down  and along the banks of the River Tay. The sunshine sparkled on the water running over the rocks. Huge old trees all along the River. Perthshire is famous for its big trees. And Birnam Wood is also famous because it is a key element in the plot of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In the witch’s prophecy. Here is Rosie tree-hugging a very old oak. possibly from the time of Shakespeare.