Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Feb 5, 2005

4th February: Cromarty

Filed in Britain 2005 (1), Landmark-Hunting, Travel

In the morning it dawned dull and grey, and I took photographs of the drops of water on the trees. I’m still learning about my new digital camera, and enjoying it very much. Working my way through the manual now; I haven’t had time so far to sit down and just learn, though I tend to push buttons until the desired effect happens and learn that way, too.

We went to the supermarket and got food, and then came back for lunch. My parents tend to have their main meal at lunchtime, so we had homemade beef stew with homegrown carrots and onions. Mmmmmm.

I weighed myself this morning to have a benchmark for whether I gain or lose weight here. According to my parents’ scales I have lost nine pounds since I got here. I don’t think so. ;-)

Dad and I headed over to Cromarty in the early afternoon. It’s only a few miles away, down a set of twisty country lanes. The sheep fill fields strewn with hundreds of white turnips, and we pass the field with the highland cows in it, close to where Bethany goes to school. The objective was to check out an oil rig with big towers, which is actually on a ship. They tow the rigs in and out, but this one is self-propelled. It was pretty impressive and I took a lot of pictures: the Cromarty Firth, the beach, the yellow flowering gorse, Stuff.

We then went on snarfari in Cromarty. So, Mr. Penguin got to revisit a bunch of places from last year, and we found a couple of new ones later. Just about everything in Cromarty is a listed building or monument of some kind; I have no intention of ever counting them all. I found a couple of new plaques and some interesting nooks and crannies and saw the new harbour. A small Shetland (?) pony munched grass on the football field and the rain held off while we explored.

I’m seeing things with a photographer’s eye these days…it’s quite a nice sensation, because you stop a bit longer and appreciate what you are seeing. You look at things in more detail and think about what you are doing. I think this is good for me, given how maniacally I rush around, especially lately. The laptop is marvellous because it allows me to download the pictures, then edit them and have them ready to go the same night more or less. I was struggling with having a bunch to do all at once, after a long trip, and getting overwhelmed.

The Hugh Miller cottage is still closed, as are most things in the area until April, including the tea houses. Hugh Miller was an author and geologist, and eventually committed suicide. One of these days I will show up in Scotland at a time when stuff is opened, and then I will be saturated in museums.

We went into an old church, the old parish church. It was dark and a little oppressive, but had steps up to galleries where you could look down from three different angles. It smelled of old wood and must, and the graveyard was rich and mossy, with snowdrops growing amongst the graves. One in particular struck me: a memorial to some parents’ children: seven of them died and were memorialised there. It was a simply stated tragedy and I can’t even imagine that much loss.

With a pass past the little stubby lighthouse, built by Alan Stevenson - one of the famous Stephenson engineering family - we were on our way home. All the lighthouses in Scotland are automated now, there are no more lighthouse keepers.

Trivia for the day: all the Stephensons were engineers except for Robert Louis, and if you don’t know what he did, it doesn’t matter. ;-)

We came home and had a quiet evening, watched some TV, talked. Family stuff.