Tuesday: "The Blood is Strong"

More Ian quotes.
"You just can't go willy-nilly, hunting. And you need the gilly--the gamekeeper--with you. So you're hunting, but you're not hunting, understand."
"I was miffed!"
"shedule"

They use "shire" in the Highlands to designate as different from the town, so Aberdeenshire is the area surrounding Aberdeen. The shire reev?, meaning leader, led to what know of as the sheriff.
Likewise, the taxes were collected in the old-old days of the Roman numerals on a checkerboard to help count the money, and so the head honcho was the Checker. After the Arabic numerals came in, he became the Exchecker---Exchequer.
In 1066 William the Conquerer brought shires together into counties, named after the counts in charge of them. But that was England, not Scotland.

bonnet = hood (as of a car)
also, the stress of the word: "controversy" (not "controversy")

Everything is much more regulated, under more government control. They have graduated taxes on cars depending on how powerful the engine is, and a twenty-pound Congestion Charge to drive into London. ("Use the public transportation! That's what it's there for!") In the Highlands you need a car, so there is less control there. But you don't see any old cars because of the safety restrictions.

In the clans, the next chief was chosen from a pool of applicants, all able to trace his bloodline back to the last chief's great-grandfather. In this way, the chiefdom would meander through the clan and in reality everyone was related to one another, although distantly. But it was a large, looseknit family. That's why they say of the Highlanders, "the blood is strong".

They have salmon hatcheries in the lochs, which they call "fin farming". The baby fish are taken by helicopter out to sea, and then eventually they come back. Helicopter!

Black wool was untaxed back in the day, leading to the "black sheep" stigma. But then farmers realized that black sheep were cheaper and allowed them to live.

"but if the farmer gets wind of a really dodgy weather..."
"quite frankly I'd think twice about toddling around there", referring to an island the government used for anthrax testing in WWII.
ZED!

In the morning we drove up to Interewe Gardens (Ewe is the local loch, so Interewe means "mouth of Ewe"). Apparently these gardens are world-famous; quite frankly I had never heard of them. But some bloke a hundred or so years ago decided the place was perfect to plant trees and flowers and such from the more tropical region of the Mediterranean. When he died, his daughter took over the gardens, and now that she has passed on it's in the Scottish Trust, or somesuch. It is surprising what can take hold up there. Palm trees, and what looked like gigantic cabbage, azaleas and rhododendron, flowers the colour of sun and flame. To walk through the gardens was very much like hiking, but there were so many paths with vague names like "Pine Walk" or "Barbatum Walk", that the maps they gave were actually required to find a way out. Just what is a barbatum anyway?

The "Jetty Path" led all the way to the end of the peninsula. I perched on rocks at the end and was surrounded on three sides by Loch Ewe and Camas Glas. A tough, steep climb up Devil's Elbow brought me to a place named something like "High Point Vista", which as suggested showed a lovely view.

A car park is a parking lot.
What we would call, say, a "egg salad sandwich" they call "egg and mayonnaise sandwich". To the Brits, "ham salad" means a sandwich with ham and a salad---lettuce, cucumber, and tomato. Clever.

We drove through the Grampian Mountains. Stopped in Beauly, the most adorable town I have ever seen. The roads reminesced of cobblestone, the storefronts were brick and stonework, white with dark edging. There were bright flowers in planters from the lampposts and in front of the windows. Beauly marked the beginning of an area that was much less of Highland and more like a green, fertile valley dominated by farms not wilderness.

In a cafe, "just coffee" prompts a question: "White or black?"
"White coffee" is what we would call "cafe au lait", coffee with milk.

Loch Ness looks just like any other loch in Scotland, it's just really deep. The Loch Ness Museum---or whatever it is---is actually not very close to the loch at all, in a town called Drumnadrochit, "drum-na-droh-cheat" is as close as I can get.

Inverness, "Mouth of Ness", is not actually near the loch at all. But it is really really cute. Not like a "modern" town, there is not very much of an industrialized, formwork look. It is old-style, not much higher than two-stories.

I'm still not quite sure what a "Scottish Breakfast" entails.