Visiting Season

We have not had many visitors this summer until the past two weeks. Three Orcadians came across the Firth. Orcadians are always good company.

More recently we had family from Norway visiting.

Connections. Making connections. Keeping Connections. It is the heartbeat of us all. Some times the simplest things linger. A few words on a summer day are enough to recall and reconnect. I like to think that the young ones who sat patiently and politely through adult conversations will recall something that makes enough of a thread that they can find their way back here someday.

The other wonderful thing about visitors is that we get to re-visit our own backyard. I realized that I rarely have in my blog the images that are often thought of as archetypes of Scottishness-thistles, castles, and wildflowers dancing in a summer breeze, so here they are.
Summer has come in very small pieces--so an entire day of sunshine and quiet winds was a rare treat.

We went to visit Sinclair Girnigoe castle. The current Earl of Caithness is working very hard to restore this family heirloom to a better condition. Much work has already been done on it, but we could not get inside the gate on our recent visit. The thistle with the hard working bee and the mixture of red clover and buttercups all came from the fields on the way to the castle. In its heyday, the castle faced on to what would have been the equivalent of a major highway--the Pentland Firth. The front door, as it were, looks out over the water. A better description would be to say that the castle grew up from the living rock almost as one with the landscape. Our visitor called it a dramatic setting, which is quite true. The view from inside is even more dramatic. Not even Rapunzel would have tried leaving by the windows.