Sunday morning in Stonehaven dawned upon Dunnottar Castle but not in our room. The curtains were closed and it was the alarm and not the sun which made me get up in the Shorehead guest house. There was much to do on our last day in Scotland.
First of all was getting ready and taking myself upstairs into the breakfast room for another full Scottish breakfast. Except for the scone on the first morning I was eating this daily. So maybe it was good to leave Scotland after all because a wee bit longer there and I would probably roll around the highlands. At least that morning we still had some walking ahead of us. Dunnottar Castle was on the list for that day. Astonishingly the castle was not in my guide-book. I had seen it on Pinterest and really wanted to see it. It looked amazing!
When we left the guest house there was low tide and the boats looked beached like stranded whales.
Shorehead guest house @Stonehaven
Stonehaven
The walk to the castle lead us along the cliffs except for the detour that Karin and I took. I really had it with the detours on this trip. Can’t remember when I took so many the last time. Or maybe I am just forgetting that in reality I cannot read a map ever and just think I know my way around? Let’s not dwell on this and move on the exceptional beautiful coastline and then finally the view on Dunnottar Castle which unfortunately had the sun in its back.
It took us about 45 minutes to get to the castle itself with all our photo stops in between. It was such a glorious day, blue sky and almost warm. I soon had to remove my jacket and was just walking around in long sleeves. All around us were rolled balls of hay in the harvested fields. The whole feeling was one of a golden time.
The castle is of course in ruins but in much better shape than Urquhart castle (which we saw the day before) although it hasn’t been in use almost the same time. The difference is that it hasn’t been blown up, just fallen in disrepair. There was no guided tour that we could have missed again, just a detailed booklet that I read later on the plane. So basically we were walking aimlessly around and checking the time in between. We still had a two-hour drive ahead.
Stonehaven
In the end we were close to the airport with quite some time to spare so decided on heading to Dunfermline to check out the cathedral there. Turned out that it wasn’t so close to the motorway after all but rather a bit of a drive. Including the traffic we made it exactly to the parking area, took a picture from there and left again. In the end we had to hurry because we still needed to fill up the car and there was no gas station right next to the airport. So to our long list of detours came another one right at the end. Which made the whole Scotland trip the adventure perfect. We had come full circle. Yours, Pollybert
Dunfermline
