Through the Highlands, To the Islands

.....Glenfarlcas distillery to start the month with. Good but not a winner as our taste buds are getting more discriminating. Next on the list was the brand-new Archives in Inverness where we presented a document referring to an ancestor that gave his location of birth but that we couldn't interpret, and needed local knowledge/expertise. The first girl handed it off to the second followed by the senior member of the team who pored over it with his books and magnifying glass before giving us his professional opinion. Alas this didn't fit with other data but at least it gave us another perspective.

Onwards to Fortrose, where we had booked a night in a pub that has 200 whisky's in stock.. After a short walk through the local ruined cathedral we settled down to one of the best dinners we've had in ages (Don with Angus beef and Linda with duck) followed by 4 more tastes of single malts. Sooo many whiskys, so little time.

June 2 - Thursday

Guess what! We started the day at a distillery. This time we toured the Glenmorangie site not far from our B&B. This is the largest and most high tech one so far and VERY good. A keeper here!

Maturing Glenmorangie in Kegs

Just down the way near Tain is a Pictish site of some note, that we explored.

Pictish Artwork in Stone

Then we headed west over some spectacular highland country, sometimes on narrow single-lane roads, to the western side of Scotland and down the coast a bit to Ullapool. This location figures into some of our genealogy so we had to visit the local museum whose staff were very kind in their attempts to help us. We really need more information however before we can trace this particular group and that is hard to come by.

Later that evening we had pub dinner overlooking the harbour followed by a concert by the Ullapool district pipe band and highland dancing by local childrens' Scottish dancing school. The townspeople follow the pipe band through town to the concert, which reminds me of my many happy summers in Kincardine (Ontario) where this is also a tradition.

Highland Dancing at its Finest

We still managed to make a reasonable early night of it, and had a very quiet and restful sleep. This has been our very first warm and sunny day, and even reached 20C. Considering we were at 58 degrees latitude (the same as last summer in Juneau, Alaska) it makes sense that 20C is a warm day here. (For those of you thinking in Fahrenheit, that's about 71.

June 3 – Friday morning was another bright sunny and warm day. We had a nice breakfast in our B&B, and visited a short while with our hosts Simon and Anne, who have some family back in B.C. We drove south along the coastal route out of Ullapool, stopping to take in the many vistas overlooking the numerous lochs and glens along the way.

Highland Cattle

By 1400 we'd arrived in Plockton, which we believe to be significant in our family history – the trouble is proving or disproving it. Being a bit early to check into our B&B, we walked around the village and stopped into the Plockton Hotel for a refeshing beverage (we're also testing local ales). Then on to our B&B, the Captain's House, built by Captain Duncan Finlayson over 200 years ago, and (possibly) related somehow to our immigrant ancestor, John Finlayson. We were greeted and checked in, but our hostess, who is descended from the said Captain, was out – so we wandered about town a bit more, chatting with locals, and combing through the gravestones in the churchyard (finding no known ancestors, but a few names worth investigating further). When we came back late in the afternoon, Julia, our hostess, was here, and we discovered that she just didn't have the time to research her history, but knew that Capt. Duncan Finlayson was born abt. 1790, and that his family was likely the only Finlayson family in the area. So perhaps they were related – certainly contemporaries. Nothing further is to be found here, although Julia tells us she has numerous documents and papers dating all the way back – she just doesn't have the time to sort/investigate. Sigh.......

Dinner at the local hotel was very good, and followed by several more whisky tastings. Then onto the internet to get the Blog, email, news, etc. Tomorrow we will continue to Localsh, and then cross the bridge to Skye, where another several branches of our family wait to be discovered.