Dunvegan Castle Gardens Mushroom Walk; The Stag Bar, Balmacara Hotel
Chapter 4

Dunvegan Castle and the Mushroom Walk

Drammin' It, Are You?

It was such a joy to be back in "my" cottage again.  Heated towel racks, Scottish shortbread, decaff coffee (very hard to get in the Highlands), private garden with a view of the harbour, a collection of books -- what more could anyone want?  David was impressed.

The cottage is still called "Betty Ramsey's Cottage", so in the spirit of treasuring history I settled down with A Scot's Quair by Louis Grassic Gibbon (which was to keep me engrossed for my entire stay).

But -- no time for lounging in the morning, we needed to stoke up for our trip to Dunvegan Castle with Donna and Tom.  After the usual fabulous hotel breakfast (this day, salmon fresh out of Loch Carron, with eggs and fresh fruit), Donna and Tom joined us for our first morning in Plockton.

Donna and Tom were staying at Alice Byrne's Minvaugh Cottage, and were so happy to be back with her.  Spotting Tom tippling the night before, she remarked, "Och Tom, you're drammin' it, are you?"  While Donna plied me with ISBNs for Doric wit, Tom hustled us off to the Isle of Skye.

Risqué Fungi

The mushroom walk near Dunvegan Castle was one of my most desired festival events, so I was quite excited as we set out to Skye.

I had thought that we'd walk a mile, see something; walk another mile, see something. But in fact, we never got more than a few hundred yards, and saw scores and scores of species. It was unbelievable.

The fellow leading the walk was quite the "absent minded professor" and it was hard to keep him going along, so absorbed would he get with any specimen brought to him. People kept calling questions to him, and he kept getting deeper into the recursive subroutines, and more lost, and finally one woman, who'd been asking again and again whether hers was poisonous, shouted: "If you don't answer me I'M GOING TO EAT IT!" So we wandered off on our own and saw rose ones, cream ruffled ones, black shaggy ones, bright red ones with white speckles, olive and gold ones, orange ones, mauve ones, ... incredible.

Toward the end, one of the guys came running up waving one with a great long thick white stem, with a bulbous red cap. Everyone stopped and went silent. I can only assume that they were, like I was, mentally putting duct tape across their mouths to prevent any injudicious comments. After lots of insincere, groped-for observations, someone finally said, "It looks quite... phallic... doesn't it?" Another long silence, so finally I said, "You know, I hadn't noticed till you mention it, but actually, ... it does!" The whole group fell out. I parted by admonishing the woman now in possession of this prize "Be sure to WASH after handling that!"

Dunvegan Castle

So to the castle. This was very hard on me, arousing my smouldering Marxism to a bright flame. After years on the streets rescuing crack babies because there are no funds to put the mothers in safehouses, it's a struggle for me to accept spending hundreds of pounds to have lavish embroidery on your baby's vest. He'll only spit up on it, won't he?

'Nuff said.  On to the castle's gardens, which were wonderful.

The Stag Bar (the Balmacara Hotel)

And then .. The Stag Bar!!! The bartender, Samuel, lost an argument whether the right fruit machine was there from the stooshie with Big Geordie. But he kindly introduced us to Glayva. We later learned that the name for this is reputed to have been born in Plockton -- a Plockton resident, sampling the then-new concoction, said, "Glè mhath," which means "quite good" in Gaelic (and is pronounced roughly "glay vah"). For as long a dram as we'd been having when I heard this, I won't swear on the truth of this story.

The Endless ScotSpeak© Research

Evening in the Plockton Hotel bar (surprise, surprise!)

Small world?  Donna and Tom ran into Sandy and Rick Iddon, proprietors of the Dun Raven B&B in Strathpeffer.  After a spell with Tom & Donna, they needed a break!  I chatted with their charming son, William, who told me, "I caught a fish and I had to throw it back," and "I do my homework very well."

This was also the night when, somewhere in the middle of my monkfish and prawns, we made the raucous and not entirely sober call to beloved Kens, as detailed in the preceding Kirsty's Tale.

And.. I learned two new words for ScotSpeak© this night: malkie and manky. Malkie means to have been killed as a result of violence (rather what happened to my haggis that night) and manky means dirty, nasty, rotting, contaminated (pilau in Hawai'ian), as were many of the mushrooms we'd viewed that day.

Dunvengan Castle Photo Gallery

Mushrooms & Lichens Photo Gallery