…Scotland, small?
Welcome to Scotland – and our blog!
Confession time: after launching our website last year, with every intention of keeping you updated and inundating you with ideas to discover your very own infinite Scotland… We got rather caught up with tours!
Admittedly this was a good problem to have, but now it is time to play catch up, reflect on the season – and to start getting excited about the new year.
I recently came across a poem by the famous Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid. It starts with the line:
“Scotland, small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland, small?”
Wait, hold on, infinite Scotland… Did he just say “infinite Scotland”? It was a sign!
The poem reads as a love story to Scotland from a typically proud Scot – we may be small geographically, and we may have some image stereotypes, but…
Through lyrical descriptions of the berries and leaves, pastel mosses; vivid flowers and glorious trees, MacDiarmid reminds us that there is an awful lot more to Scotland’s landscape than our, admittedly beautiful and iconic, heather-clad hills.
Sounds familiar?
We can’t help ourselves – when guests say “our friends at home said we had to visit Loch Ness otherwise it would be like we hadn’t even been to Scotland”, we slightly scrunch up our eyes. And then we gently lead you down the path of discovering all of the other, many, infinite possibilities we have to explore.
So with all that in mind, perhaps it’s time to give you a little flavour of what we and guests got up to this year to whet your appetite.
- Exploring alleyways and discovering unexpected histories of elephants and oysters and feisty females in Edinburgh’s Old Town.
- Feasting on local seafood on a private luxury sailing boat bobbing around in one of Scotland’s most picturesque sea lochs – rowed back to shore by the skipper long after the sun went down.
- Private clarsach [traditional Scottish harp] concert from local musicians in a historic cottage on the shore of Loch Ness (so yes, we do visit – we just do it differently!)
- Peace and tranquillity on the Island of Iona, cradle of Scottish Christianity –a true bucket-list moment for one guest who had been dreaming of it for 50+ years.
- Unique personal gin tasting with the founders of one of Scotland’s newest craft gin brands in their hidden-away start-up distillery.
- Puffin-spotting off the Orkney Islands, constantly scanning the waters for those orange beaks.
- Silly conversations with cute Highland cow calves and more sensible (maybe) conversations with their farmer.
- Soaking up the sun’s rays in the middle of a barely visited 3000 year old stone circle beneath towering mountains.
- An unexpected encounter with a certain member of the Royal family whilst out for an exploratory hike in Cairngorms National Park (talk about those bucket list moments).
- Counting unicorns at every possible opportunity with some younger guests. We know that their parents were secretly joining in too.
- Enjoying the music and dancing and sounds and colour and mayhem of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August.
- Eating scones and scones and shortbread and scones and haggis and cheese and more scones. Washed down by… whisky!
And of course there was much, much more.
So are you excited about planning your travels for 2020 yet? Give us a shout! We can’t wait to get started!
It’s an infinite Scotland out there remember, nothing small about it – and it’s all yours to discover… Welcome to Scotland!
