June 18th: Braemar mostly

The weather today was a bit better, so we packed up from our campsite and drove over to a waterfall on our way out of Pitlochry.

Yesterday, when we were at the Crannog Museum, we asked one of the docents what the people who lived in the Crannog were called. He replied, “I dunno, Jeff maybe?” Since then, I’ve learned that they were mostly Celts (which was the category I was asking about). I have been thinking a lot about that response, as I’ve also been fiddling with Merlin, the app that will help recognize birds by call and photo. I saw my first ever House Sparrow at the Black Spout waterfall, on June 18th 2026.

I mean, I’ve seen plenty of House Sparrows, but this one was a lifer, meaning I had never actually logged it in the app before. I typically don’t do that, the whole thing is a bit weird and reminiscent of the Jeff thing. I mean yeah, I’ve seen a house sparrow officially now. I’ve also seen this one. Of course, I only very briefly saw it, and said “yeah, that looks roughly like the photo, and the app recognized the birdsong, so yeah, I’ve seen a House Sparrow now.” There’s something very, specific in this feeling of knowledge about the world mediated by a machine, an app, a tool built by humans for a specific purpose. Before the app, I saw a really cute bird, maybe Jeff. Now it’s a House Sparrow, one of many (a very common bird). As I write this, a Great Tit flew by the camper and just started hopping around on a tree looking for whatever it is Great Tits look for. I live in this particular reality, and the shape of my world, the nouns and the edges that relate those nouns to each other are mediated by someone else. From now on, I may name all my birds Jeff.

Today we walked to the aforementioned Black Spout, which was impressive. Much bigger waterfall than I expected. We parked in the lot of the Blair Athol distillery, because when you drive a semi-behemoth van you take real parking lots over curbside parking (or should I say kerbside as I’m in Scotland?) all the time.

We popped in to the distillery and tasted their wares, and … well, I guess I really go for the peated whiskys, because that was good but not, you know “I’m going to spend a hundred GBP on this bottle” good. I tell you what though, the smell was astounding. There was this rich malty mash smell in the air, if they could bottle that, I’d pay handsomely for it. After the spout and the distillery, we kept the car parked for a bit and went to a record shop (none of the Very Specific albums I would really like to get, but I did get a Zappa that had been in the BBC record library and Lyle Lovett’s Pontiac (no skips, great album)). Hit up the grocery store again; I love driving a camper that has a fridge, it’s so much easier to just shop as needed and cook.

Bidding farewell to Pitlochry, we drove on to Braemar. Along the way we stopped at a Garden that was closed (despite being well within their posted hours), and a fresh milkshake vending machine that was also closed unexpectedly (and the foreshadowing from yesterday pays off!) I didn’t know how a milkshake vending machine works, and frankly, I still don’t know. There was a little kid there with a spiderman shirt and wellies, waving while his Dad mopped up. The kid was going to visit his Auntie, so they had to close the vending machine. Which is a sentence I still, upon typing it, cannot parse. Chrissy tried to explain it to me several times, but I basically just gave up trying to understand it before she succeeded. So much of our understanding of the world is mediated by cultural artifacts, sometimes I just cannot understand why a vending machine would stop working because a kid needed to visit his Auntie. And why “Auntie”, couldn’t the dad in the conversation say “my sister” (or sister in law)? Things like this keep me thinking way past when normal people let go.

UPDATE! Upon reading the post, Chrissy informs me that she talked to the kid in the spider-man shirt and wellies, so that explains the Auntie vs Sister thing at least.

We’re in the Cairngorms mostly for the past few days, a national park with a lot of mountains and rivers and whatnot. Braemar is the site where the River Dee meets the River Gairn. There’s a lot of castles there, including one that was donated to / purchased by the community, to run as an attraction and history museum. I like the idea of community-run castles (Menzies, which we missed, had been taken over by Clan Menzies, for example). I got a little crash course in who the Jacobites were, and honestly: a little disappointed. I had hoped all these dudes were running around with big swords and dirks and muskets in the highlands because they wanted some kind of freedom (maybe I was over-indexing on Braveheart, so sue me- I realize Scotland has a really long history and quite a lot of it did not involve Mel Gibson, probably for the best really, all things considered).

Where was I? Oh yeah. The Jacobites were fighting to bring back the Stuart kings, here I was hoping they were fighting against kings entirely. That, I can get behind. Let’s return power to the people, ownership of the castle to the community or clan, and just do our own thing. No need to have a lot of kings and whatnot. Anyway, the castle was pretty rad either way, although weird because I have this whole “castles are old” thing in my head- to see one that had been used well into the 1900s as just a place to live (or rent out for a summer vacation usually, according to the docents), with fancy rugs and tables and whatnot seemed out of order.

Back to Braemar, coffee by another waterfall (no photo, sorry), and off to the campsite. Dinner was a chicken pesto pasta with the second half of the chicken thighs we got at the Lidl on our first day in Scotland (not sure if it is a Lidl thing or a UK thing, but despite all the boneless skinless breasts, the only thighs were bone in skin on, so a bit more work to cook, but worth it). Another semi-cheatery thing, it’s premade pesto, usually at home at least I’ll make the pesto from scratch, but I just don’t have the tools for that out here.