Scotland – The First of Many

For the past two weeks I’ve been in Scotland with my mother and daughter, a three-generation journey to reconnect with our roots and each other.  Instead of a chronological travelogue I’d like to offer up snippits, collections of photos and stories that begin to fill out the incredibly rich narrative of our trip.  In two weeks we saw so much, spent every waking and sleeping moment together, and got to really know Scotland from the soles of our feet to our noses.

First, a few pictures from a hill on the Isle of Skye, near Dunvegan.  We were heading to the castle at Dunvegan but passed an old church and decided to stop.  This is what travel should be–the unplanned diversions that trump the destinations.  From there we spotted a standing stone rising up like a finger from the brow of a grassy hill.  CH could not be stopped–even as my mom and I poked around the church ruins, CH was charging up the hill like a Marine.  She came back breathless with tales of caterpillars, waving grass, and the big stone.  I had to go explore with her.

The standing stone was put there a bit more recently than you’d think:  2000 AD.  Just fifteen years ago the inhabitants of Skye raised it using ancient methods (and a bit of concrete around the base) to commemorate…I can’t remember now.  From the top of the hill, a stout wind flapping our clothes, we understood why they picked the spot.

So often on this trip we came upon scenes too good for a coffee table book–mists shredding above craggy peaks, sheep polka-dotting jade-green fields, and miles of delicate purple heather standing up to unstoppable wind.  Maybe because my ancestors hail from Scotland but I feel a rising in my chest when I see this picture, my daughter coming to love and connect with a place I’ve visited twice before and keep going back because it’s one of the places in the world I feel most grounded, most peaceful.

The places we visited and liked the most were apologetically wild:  Harris, Lewis, the Cairngorms.  In the coming weeks I’ll show a few of my favorite images that give little justice to the wonderful countryside of Scotland, but really you ought to go there yourself.  In seven hours from the East Coast you can be stepping off a plane in Edinburgh, feeling the cool damp air on your face that has blown itself clean coming across the Atlantic.  You might feel, as CH did in the picture above, compelled to stand and stare, losing yourself in a magical place.

About Peter Soutowood

Writer, architect, father, husband.