Day 2: Fyvie Castle

 We bought a week’s bus pass to anywhere and caught a double-decker into the countryside, sitting upstairs in the front windows to see everything. It was lambing season, and the hills were covered in new babies. Also, I saw a badger! It was a dead. And a river otter! Also dead. But I’ve never seen one of either before, so it still counts.

Fyvie Castle was beautiful, and half of it is still a private residence today. The tour guide told interesting stories about the badly behaved people who have lived there since the 1200s; getting drunk and racing horses and donkeys up the 10-foot stone staircase, murdering their wives when they didn’t get sons, owners insisting on being buried in the walls, and the badly abused dwarf who grew up with patronizing rich people like a pet and became a warrior with a custom suit of armor after surviving being thrown against starving animals for sport (there is a small book called “Lord Minimus” written about his life, which I will have to read).

We took a chance and walked down onto the Laird’s land to try to find the site of James Giles’ painting, and discovered a lot of clues about how it was made, and what was embellished for art’s sake. I fell over a mossy log and took a spill into a patch of wild daffodils. Embarrassing.

In the evening we bundled up in warmer clothes and walked to a Thai restaurant for dinner, which was very fancy and acceptably tasty. It’s probably hard to get all the right ingredients in the land of sheep and puffins, but they did okay.

My legs are very angry about suddenly being made to walk 10 miles a day, and they had better stfu because today we’re walking a coastal path from Stonehaven to Castle Dunnottar, which should not have changed much at all in 200 years. Our throats are trying to get sore, and that will not be tolerated either. It had better be the weather and not travel plague. We will stock up on decongestants and ibuprofen today.