purplecat

I'm so behind on posting summer holiday pictures. However I assume no one minds much...

Anyway no Scottish holiday would be complete without a visit to a distillery. We went for a tour and tasting of Highland Park, though we had rather more drivers and teenagers in the party than drinkers and ended up taking away a lot of small tasting bottles with us.



This is the malt floor where the barley is spread out and turned by hand for malting. No barley there when we went to see and it wasn't entirely clear to me how much of the barley that goes into Highland Park was actually hand turned on this malt floor.

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Apparently the Porteus company, makers of this Malt Mill have long been out of business having unfortunately made their products so well that they rarely break down. As far as I can gather you are now in trouble if you are a distillery where the malt mill has stopped working, since no one makes them any more.


And here is some actual whiskey, stored in a locked customs warehouse but with a window where we could look in to see it.


I found I rather liked Highland Park. Not as peaty as the whiskey's I normally drink but it slips down easier as a result.

Our next stop on the road trip was Unstan Chambered Cairn. There was another low entrance so Ragnor opted to remain outside. However, unlike Maeshowe, there was no guide, no ban on photographs and no railings to stop you touching the archeology. It might be a minor tomb in Orkney terms, but was nevertheless pretty impressive inside with the partitioned main chamber and a smaller chamber to one side. The roof had been replaced, but at least that let in plenty of light.

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As I have mentioned, I have fond memories of my time in the Arthurian society and our habit of going on "pilgrimages" which involved driving around the country in a minibus and visiting random ancient monuments, many of which were interesting only because they were called "Arthur's Ring" or "Arthur's Quoit" or some such. Given the plethora of "minor" neolithic sites on Orkney, I persuaded the adults in the party that we should spend a day on a neolithic road trip. The teenagers opted out of this clear idiocy.

Our first stop was the Ring of Bookan which is close by the far more impressive Ring of Brodgar. Bookan is a henge monument consisting of a bank and ditch and the remains of a chambered cairn in the centre. We got out of the car, wandered across a field, and found the ring with ease. There are also the Bookan Cairns to the southeast which the guide book described as a series of mounds and a substantial quarry, but our attempt to get to them was foiled by the existence of fences. We had more interesting things to see and there was a risk we could spend some time navigating around field edges and gates while trying to get to what were just "mounds" and so we went back to the car.

Kirbuster is a farmhouse built in 1723 that now houses a Farm museum organised more or less along the lines of "put stuff in a room and let people look at it". We picked it randomly for a visit from the tourist map which showed it as close to the Earl's Palace at Birsay.

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This is the Stone O'Quoybune which is almost entirely unremarkable but we stopped to take photos of it since it was between Birsay and Kirkbuster and I feel, in principle, one should stop and look at minor standing stones as one passes them.

Skara Brae is a neolithic village, comprised of a group of dwelling with doorways opening onto a central passageway that was roofed over with stone slabs. It was excavated in the 1850s when a great storm blew away the top of the sand dunes that covered it, including the tough grass, making access to the site easy and it was quickly recognised as something special. I was introduced to it as a child through a book called The Boy with the Bronze Axe which, to my pleasure was available in the shop and is now on my to read pile.

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