Tag Archives: lake

Scotland Notes

Beinn: is the most common Gaelic word for “mountain”

Coffee americano: (black coffee with 2 shots of espresso)

Chips: French Fries

Dinnae: Don’t.  My grandmother and people in the church where I grew up said this all the time.  “A dinnae ken” which means “I don’t know”.

Haggis: Haggis is a savoury pudding containing sheep’s pluck (heart, liver and lungs); minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, traditionally encased in the animal’s stomach though now often in an artificial casing instead. According to the 2001 English edition of the Larousse Gastronomique: “Although its description is not immediately appealing, haggis has an excellent nutty texture and delicious savoury flavour”.

We have my grandmother’s old cookbook with recipes for haggis, lights, sweetbreads (don’t ask), blood pudding… I never could have made it in the olden days!

We also saw haggis pizza, haggis flavored chips, frozen haggis…  We tried none of that.

I was going to put a picture but I couldn’t stomach it (NO pun intended!)

Loch en Eilein:  Simply – loch means lake.  Eilein means island.  So, there’s an island in the lake 🙂

Place suffixes:

-more:

-ness:  a promontory or headland.  Loch Ness is a lake with a promontory

-shire: Roughly “county of”  Inverness-shire; Perthshire

-strath: a wide river valley, a stretch of relatively flat, fertile land bounded by hills.  Strathspey is the River Spey and the valley around it.

 

Interesting place names:

  • Crook of Devon:  The name derives from the sudden angle (crook) which the River Devon makes near the village. A village within the parish of Fossoway in Perthshire. It is located about 6 miles southwest of Kinross on the A977 road. Until relatively recently the official name of the village was Fossoway (as evidenced on the war memorial etc.) but this has been usurped by the widely used nickname “crook of devon”.
  • Drumnadrochit: It derives from the Scottish Gaelic ‘druim na drochaid’ meaning the ‘Ridge of the Bridge’.
  • Firth of Forth: (Scottish Gaelic: Linne Foirthe) is the estuary or firth of Scotland’s River Forth, where it flows into the North Sea, between Fife to the north and Lothian to the south. It was known as Bodotria in Roman times.
  • Inverfarigaig: (Scottish Gaelic: Inbhir Farragaig) is a hamlet at the mouth of the River Farigaig, on the south-east shore of Loch Ness in Inverness-shire, Scottish Highlands and is in the Scottish council area of Highland.
  • Kingdom of Fife: (Scottish Gaelic: Fìobha) is a council area and historic county of Scotland. It is situated between the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth, with inland boundaries to Perth and Kinross and Clackmannanshire. By custom it is widely held to have been one of the major Pictish kingdoms, known as Fib, and is still commonly known as the Kingdom of Fife within Scotland.
  • Killiecrankie.  I have no idea how it got this name.  It sounds sort of like you want to kill the crank but that can’t be right.
    Killiecrankie (Gaelic: Coille Chreithnich) is a village in Perth and Kinross, Scotland on the River Garry.
  • Loch Faskally: (Scottish Gaelic: Loch Faschoille is a man-made reservoir in Perth and Kinross, Scotland, 2.5 kilometres (1.6 mi) northwest of Pitlochry.

Playlist of all my Scotland videos plus others of interest:

 

 

Scotland Trip

Edinburgh Tattoo

 

I have to admit, my main reason for wanting to go to Scotland was to see the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, which we did on August 12, 2015.  But the rest of the trip was amazing, too.  Now, I want to go back!

I loved how we could set out to do one thing then – look!  There’s a castle on the left! – something more interesting would happen.

I loved how friendly and helpful everyone was; how green it was everywhere; the ubiquitous sheep; the brogue; the mountains, lakes and rivers; so many people outdoors hiking and biking…  The list goes on and on.

There are a few things I didn’t like but those will show up later, in the day to day posts 🙂

 

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