Best of Scotland 2016
a dolly on tour
After lunch in Dunkeld, we went on a tour of a whisky distillery. It’s a very Scottish thing to do, but as a nondrinker I found it pretty boring and very smelly. The only bit of personal interest is called Towser. Towser is a cat who lived at the distillery. When she died she held the Guiness World Record for most mice caught in her lifetime.
After a boring afternoon, I had to reclaim the rest of the day. While everyone else in the tour group was resting before dinner, I went out exploring around our hotel in Aberfeldy. I found a little nature trail.
There was a statue of Robert Burns, one of Scotland’s most famous writers. According to a plaque, this is where he was inspired to write The Birks of Aberfeldy. Another interpretive sign informed me that a Birk is a birch tree.
A google search found me a lyric:
The hoary cliffs are crown’d wi’ flowers,
White o’er the linns the burnie pours,
And rising, weets wi’ misty showers
The birks of Aberfeldy.
And another google search provides some Scottish translations. I learned birk on the trail, and I already knew that a burn is a stream, so a burnie would be a small stream. Hoary means gray, a linn is a waterfall, and weets means wet. I'm pretty sure I saw what he was talking about!
The birks were such a nice discovery, but nobody else in our group saw them!
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