I had a very early day today for a Saturday. I left at 8:15AM on a bus going to Huntly Castle, Elgin Cathedral, Spynie Palace, and Dallas Dhu Distillery. The trip was planned by the International Student Society so it was nice to just show up and not have to worry about anything beforehand. (Also, it’s a whole lot cheaper.) The weather today couldn’t have been nicer. The sun was only behind clouds for a little bit towards the end of the day, and I had to take off my coat after just a few minutes of walking.
Huntly Castle was about an hour away and my plans to sleep didn’t go so well. The scenery was to interesting to close my eyes. The castle, cathedral, and palace were all in ruins but were much more together than any of the other ruins I have been to yet. Huntly Castle was huge! We were only given an hour to look around and I spent the entire hour running from place to place looking into rooms and taking pictures. (I took a ridiculous amount of pictures today…302 after deleting the ones that didn’t turn out.) I kept expecting to run out of new things to see but then I’d find a new room I hadn’t peeked into yet. I really liked the kitchen because it had a fire place the size of my room. Then when you stood in the fire place and looked up you could through the entire chimney and out the top of the castle. All four floors of the castle! (All the other chimneys had been blocked off so far.) This castle seemed to be the place for cool fire places. There were also two other fireplaces on the top floor that still had the decorative stone around them. Huntly Castle still had quite a bit of the designs left in the stone throughout it and it was a nice change to see more than just crumbling walls. Not that there is anything wrong with the crumbling walls.
Next, we went to Elgin Cathedral. This was my favorite place so far. So much of the cathedral was still standing we had to run even faster to see everything than we did at Huntly. Once again, we only had an hour. The first thing I did was go up the two towers that were pretty much completely together still. I wish I would have counted the number of steps it took to get to the top, it took at least a minute and a half to reach the top. I was starting to get dizzy by the time I was at the top. One cool thing about the steps, some had writing on them. I couldn’t read it very well but I’m pretty sure it was latin. Anyway, the top of the tower had an amazing view. It was a couple hundred feet high and I took a lot of pictures from up there. It gave a great view of the cathedral grounds. The reason I liked the cathedral so much was the intricacy of the stone. All of the walls had designs running along them and the windows were more than just square wholes. The vaulted ceilings, where there were ceilings, looked like they took a lot of work to build but the time was worth it. The building was not the only thing to look at. Around the entire cathedral was a cemetery. I found a couple tombstones that dated back to 1670’s and I’m sure there were even older ones as well. The only reason I have to assume there were older ones is that they were so worn down and covered with moss, you couldn’t read what they said. Many of the tombstones were elaborate with figures and different architecture. Looking back I guess it was weird to spend so much time walking through the cemetery but it was still worth it.
Spynie palace was worth going to but not worth staying there for an hour. I really enjoyed it and the scenery was beautiful there just wasn’t an hours worth of entertainment. One thing all of these places had in common was tall towers you could walk up. This is where the tallest tower, of some kind I can’t remember, in Scotland stood. It wasn’t the one I got to go up but the theme seemed to keep popping up at all the places we went. After looking at all the ruins, I thought it would be fun to go looking through the woods surrounding the palace. I was right it was fun, but the woods were more like a swamp than woods. So, I didn’t get very far before having to turn around.
Finally, we made it to the Dallas Dhu Distillery. This distillery had actually closed down in the 1980’s and was just a museum now. They did, however, have a sample to try when we walked in the door. It was a blended whisky that you can only get at the Dallas Dhu Distillery and it was called Roderick Dhu. I liked the taste. It was a little sweeter than the other whiskies I’ve tried so far and I was tempted to buy a bottle before leaving but I didn’t. The museum took you through the steps of making the whisky and I finally made the connection between chemistry and the process. I knew they distilled in the process but I never realized it’s the exact same thing I do when I distill in Chem lab. Obviously, it was a very informative tour.
Today was very busy yet a good busy. I got to see so much I could barely keep it all straight by the end of the day. It was a great day.
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