Wallet, passport, phone: the three essentials of any trip abroad. “If you forget anything, you can always buy a replacement.” This is my mantra. But forgetting generally also serves as punishment: I learned on the trip to Ireland that if you forget deodorant, you get stuck with European Punishment Spray, which is a very cold and unpleasant way to not smell like armpits.
Which brings me to this trip’s tragedy: when I pulled out my camera, I realized that The Forgotten Thing on this trip is, in fact, my walkaround lens. Instead, I have with me my long lens. I used it to take a baller picture of the moon a few weeks ago and never swapped back, and didn’t look too closely when I was packing my stuff up. Look, when you are in a hurry to pack, the lenses are kind of sort of the same….if you squint. (No, not really! This lens is much heavier and longer than the other one! ugh!!! And I even almost packed both, which would have avoided this tragedy entirely!)
And so this is probably the story of how I might be buying a used camera lens. Oof. Well, at least that has utility and can be resold. Tune in a few days to learn the conclusion of my several hundred dollar folly (or not).
But hey, Scotland! That’s where we are! The land of clans, scotch, kilts, and highland cattle.
A few months back, I booked this trip on a deal-based whim via Icelandair. We had a 50 minute layover in Reykjavik on the way to Glasgow, which broke up the otherwise 8ish hours of plane time nicely.
I have never seen Real Night in Iceland, and I have also never seen snow there, either. Both of these things were happening as we were landing and then leaving again. At least I could turbo-stuff my bag with licorice at the nearest duty-free and then shiver as we waited to board our plane, while freezing rain pelted us in our eyeballs. Ok Iceland, I am awake now. Thank you.
Glasgow! It’s sunny here. The airport is medium-sized and we were through all the security things in a jiffy.
In baggage claim, a local man informed us that we had to at least get an IRN-BRU soda, so we complied, lest we be kicked out of the country immediately.
Now to wait forever in the car rental line (this is my luck lately). Annnnd instead of having a smooth pickup, apparently if you do not pre-pay for your rental with sixt and you are later than your guesstimated arrival time, they release your car and then only have SUVs in stock for $200+ more than your rental rate. With a group of four I wouldn’t have cared, but with two I do (and our friend said NOT to have an SUV here, which I tend to agree with in the UK)….so Hamish the Helpful Sixt guy said he might have something in an hour if we wouldn’t mind waiting in the nearby starbucks.
Well he called me about 10 minutes later and confirmed that he wouldn’t have anything for 2-3 hours, and then he super kindly set us up with a replacement care from Europcar for only about $50. And it’s ready now. Yay. We’ll take it.
It turned out to be some fancy mercedes with a built-in GPS system and Far Too Many Buttons. It notably only has USB-C plugs inside, which is moderately annoying since I deliberately also left my USB-C cords at home. Oh well. We’re on the road to our first stop: our lodgings for a nap. I am really good at stopping more suddenly than planned because it is a gas car and just keeps going when I take my foot off the gas. Arielle doesn’t seem to mind or at least keeps her screams inside her heart because I keep startling myself by having to slam the break. Good luck everyone else.
We didn’t turn on the heat in our flat for our nap because “we didn’t need it.” This was assuredly a lie because we are both lizard women, and I woke up a little bit before my alarm went off because I was cold. And that made leaving our house harder, but we set off to explore a nearby abandoned 13th century castle, Kilmahew Castle, which I found just by diddling around in google as I was avoiding leaving my warm blanket cocoon.
Kilmahew is also conveniently located near an abandoned seminary, St Peters, which is this graffitied and abandoned brutalist structure smack in the middle of the woods near the castle. Supposedly there are also secret bridges and an old garden in the woods somewhere, but we decided we were too stupid and tired to hunt for those, so just the seminary and castle for us.
It is worth noting that none of these places really have an address that the car’s GPS can handle and I’m too addled at this point to care. I plugged in just the name of the road like any sane person would do and we leftly drove the car away.
Upon arrival, the GPS gave up and the road quickly turned into a one-lane, barely paved path. There are pedestrians with dogs. Some of them are old ladies who we are pretty sure are mocking us (as they should be), for our moronic attempt to drive on the road (pictured below).
So I drove up the road, turned around, and then left to park in the neighborhood, past the pedestrians who I’m sure were double shaming us at this point. At least it is through nice countryside – it’s the golden hour, you can see some nice baby mountains across a bay, and the road goes through rolling farm fields with ancient stone fences, a golf course, and normal-not-highland cows.
And boy, this trip is gonna feature a lot of high-quality cow pictures if I don’t rectify my lens situation.
It took us walking up and down the road incorrectly one time to realize we ignored a key fork in the road which would lead to the seminary and castle (there are NO signs except for one that tells you to look out for “stray” golf balls), but we eventually found our way to some big, welcoming, barbed wire-topped gates.
The gates were before the seminary, which has lots of keep out/unsafe signs telling you not to climb it (ignored by many people). I’m also sort of here because I saw graffiti in google reviews that said “cheese tits” and I want to see it.
No cheese tits were found, but the graffiti and the structure itself was pretty interesting. There was a lot of pooled water, it looked like the lowest level of the foundation was totally flooded, and you could wander through the structures on the premises. Nature was busy reclaiming it with lots of vines, which were also graffitied.
We explored all of its crannies but could not, for the life of us, find the path to the castle.
The only way to find the path to the castle is via aggressive zooming and spinning around on google maps and then using directions to the castle that are located In the reviews of the castle on google.
Yes. That’s right. This is exactly what my running-on-two-hours-of-sleep brain needs: a digital scavenger hunt.
One person said “just past the pond” (I see the pond on the map but how do I get to it????)
Another said “this place is easy to walk around in without getting lost! You just keep finding things!” REALLY?? Have you met me? I am someone who left their most appropriate camera lens at home and all I keep finding is the ravine with the river.
But the final and most important clue was “Go through the tunnel of trees.” We saw a car parked near an area that looked more trampled than the rest, and discovered the magical tunnel of trees.
The path was soggy and muddy, as foretold by the reviews, so our hiking boots kept us happy. The trail also at one point narrowed to deerpath status, which we weren’t sure was correct, but we traipsed through some waist-high flowers like fae women anyway.
At last! We found our old castle. 13th century, abandoned since the 1800s, and with a small amount of graffiti – there it was. And the light is long and beautiful, and we can hear the nearby creek rushing through the rocks, so everything feels just a little bit magical. Yay!
Nobody had graffitied “cheese tits” on it (yet), but you could see where the levels were, and changes in brick and stonework on the original structure. Neat!
There is some neat in-depth information on the castle here if you’re interested, offered by the group that acquired the land in 2020 which is aiming to restore the castle: https://www.kilmahew.org/medieval-castle
Mission achieved, we headed home for Indian food (because why not) and plotting our day to Skye tomorrow.
