Our first night in Scotland went well and this morning we ventured out on foot to try and find the castles.

It was a nice walk through ancient woods, with some trees as old as 200 years old. Lots of gnarly branches and stuff, it was pretty cool.

Along the way we came across a little shelter overlooking the wetlands, where apparently you could sit quietly and watch the birds.

So we did.

There weren’t any.

There was, however, a board behind us showing all the birds we could have seen. Ducks. Seagulls. And various other birds that looked suspiciously like the sort of thing we see every day anyway.

We decided we weren’t missing much and carried on to the castle.

Or what was left of it.

The first one was known as the Old Castle, although calling it a castle was being fairly generous. It didn’t have any walls. Just a few rocks in the ground showing where the walls had once been.

Apparently they’d chosen a terrible place to build it. The ground was too damp and unstable, which seems like something you might want to check before building a castle.

But, they built another one a little further along.

And this one was much more castle-like.

It had walls! And a moat! And towers! The whole thing was seriously impressive.

You could pay to go inside, but from experience, castles nearly always look better from the outside. That’s our way if justifying it anyway.

So we circled the outside instead, took far too many photos, and wandered back through the woods to the van.
By now it was lunchtime, so we made egg and salad sandwiches and decided we quite liked it here.
So we stayed another night.

We spent the afternoon editing, playing chess and sleeping.

Well, why not.