North

Woke to cloud again but the forecast was for sunny intervals even here in the east so we decided to go north a bit. We started out by taking the tiny ferry across from the village to Nigg. We just missed one, but only had to wait 20 mins for it to chug across and back again and that gave us time for another coffee and a cheeky piece of delicious coconut and lime cake to share from Slaughterhouse coffee. We squeezed onto the ferry with one other car and a bike, and were soon over the other side and heading north. We stopped first at Dornoch and had a very pleasant wander around, revisiting the cathedral with its lovely stained glass windows and browsing various shops. We’d planned to have lunch in a cafe there but it was packed and so we drove down to the beach and shared a very tasty haddock wrap from a little seafood shack before walking down to the beach itself. Unfortunately the cloud was very stubbornly hanging around and S had developed a bit of a blister so we didn’t walk too far along the beach….its a huge long expanse of sand and although there were more shells than I’ve seen recently there weren’t many of interest and no sea glass or etc.
Back at the car we drove on to Dunrobin Castle and decided to look round inside as well as in the gardens. It was interesting to see the various rooms and read about the castle’s long period of development from the early keep established in the 13th century. I liked the nursery and dining rooms best but we explored everything and it was lovely to find fresh flowers in almost every room and bowls planted up with mini orchids, as well as views of the gardens from many of the windows (extra).
We then went out into the walled gardens by the sea, by which time the sun had finally broken through, and we had a very pleasant time looking at the various plants, admiring the extensive box hedges around every bed and catching the end of the falconry display (extra).
We drove back south and stopped at Tain to visit @alfthomas, left by @arclight to supervise the new paving works in their garden. We had a lovely tea and cake stop and chatted about gardens, degree choices, madness in US politics, castles and all sorts else before we took our leave and headed back for our return ferry trip. We were not best pleased to wait for a while only to find out that we’d just missed the last one….neither of us had seen the sign saying the service stopped at 6.15pm. Deep breathing as we had to turn and drive all the way around so we were quite late home. Chatted to A as she was also driving home, about dogs, work stresses at N’s current place, neighbours, birthday plans and the weather.
When we got home we stuck some potatoes in the oven to bake whilst we had some down time then had supper before the second episode of The Jetty. We realised we’d completely missed a key plot point last night but have got our heads round it now!