November 05, 2002
Plockton
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Click on the pictures for a bigger version
This weekend we visited Plockton (left hand picture above). It’s a beautiful village (and in fact it appears in the Wicker Man and Hamish Macbeth) and very quiet at this time of the year. It was nice to get away and see a bit more of Scotland as well.
Scotland can be an odd kind of place. People have this romantic view of the place (and the fact you can take pictures like those above doesn’t help much) but there is also a lot of it that is quite incongruous in some ways – dams, pipelines, forest workings etc. The few buildings that are around are fairly modern and often quite ugly. I guess a lot of this is down to the highland clearances. In the 1800’s the few people that owned the land in Scotland essentially cleared it of its residents. I am in the process of trying to learn more about this so I am not going to make uninformed comment about it. The end result though is that a lot of the history of Scotland is quite intangible – fields where battles took place or locations of incidents etc. The most concrete evidence is the various visitors centres dotted around.