Scotland Travel Blog September 07

"Time Flies"

Time certainly does fly and I'm amazed to find myself typing up the September diary so soon. It's also been a hectic month so the diary has been a bit neglected due to a sudden influx of requests for customised tour itineraries.

Several of the Customised Tours were for people wishing to travel in Scotland during the Christmas / New Year period and that creates its own set of problems. In winter the Highlands of Scotland really do shut down and finding open Tourist Attractions in late December requires a lot of planning and local knowledge.

Visiting Scotland in Winter does have it charms though, and some of our best touring experiences have been in friendly rural pubs with open fires on cold winter evenings. The cosy bar at the Ormidale Hotel on Arran is a great example of this and we have spent some great evenings here after being marooned on the island by winter storms. Tommy's quiz nights and the large plates of venison casserole being the highlights of our visits to the Ormidale.

Our travels in September were mainly in the Angus and Aberdeen areas. In Angus we made a visit to Edzell Castle to try to get some photographs of the gardens with the flowers in peak bloom. The big thing about Edzell Castle is its Renaissance style garden. Indeed the ruins of Edzell castle wouldn't really draw many visitors if it wasn't for the garden which is a very civilized feature for a Scottish castle.

The village of Edzell is also a very quaint little collection of houses and shops that have retained an old fashioned charm.

Another notable event during our September travels was a visit to Drum Castle to watch a re-enactment of a battle that took place in 1644 between the Marquis of Montrose's royalist troops and a Covenanter army. We will add some video footage of this to the website if we can workout how to!