July 12th blog
We sit on a rainy Sunday in a coffee shop that reminds us of an Applebee's. It's the only place in Inverness with WiFi on a Sunday. But it's raining outside with an impending storm sweeping across Scotland so we're taking a train to Edinburgh and will travel southeast. The North has been beautiful and treated us well but we must say goodbye.
We have posted some photos to Facebook--search ScotlandIreland HutchJacobs to friend us if you have not already.
The last time we wrote we were in a pretty little village called Dufftown. We biked by about 10 distillery's and only checked out two of them. JIM was in heaven. The Glenfiddich distillery is definitely worth checking out if you're ever in Scotland's whisky territory. We then biked on a muddy trail for twenty miles and when the rain became too much we pulled over and camped by the river with a Scottish family that was was walking the trail. Scottish Mom and Dad had had enough of traveling with three kids, two of which were 12 and 14 year old girls. I think they were happy to have us as a distraction for a night. We woke up to some rain in our tent, waited for a window of sunshine to take down camp and biked up to Anthony's ancestral past and now I will let him tell you all about his day of Violet's house, burned down churches, graveyards and the birth place of his great grandfather.
Thank you for the setting the stage Clara. We are in Inverness sitting out the storm that caused the lobstermen to haul in 600 lobster pots from the North Sea. A word of warning, for those of you unrelated to me (or even some that are) you may not find the following exceptionally intriguing, but it was a day of returning to a place my great-grandfather Alexander Gilbert left 121 years ago.
The first thing I learned is that no one in Scotland knew where the village was. From our arrival in Aberdeen I asked most Scots people I saw where the village of Knockando was and everyone told me they did not think such a place existed. I was disheartened. Someone finally told me that I was most likelu pronoucing it wrong. After spelling it to them I was told, "Ahh, yes, Knockando". So after years of pronouncing it 'Knock-and-dew', I discovered that it was actually pronounced as, 'No-condo', as in, "Did you buy a house? No, Condo." With the correct pronounciation we followed a bike path on the river Spey from Dufftown through Aberlour towards Knockando. The people I had talked to on the way told me there was nothing there. A shop? No. Pub? No. Bakery? No. Nothing. So we bought groceries and arrived along the river south of the town late at night in the rain.
In the morning we had breakfast and biked in a light rain up long curving green hills covered in sheep that someone had spray painted with green dots. The town of Knockando is 15 houses on a small narrow road. The mobile library van sat idling on the side of the road. There was no one there. It was empty, quiet. We biked past the houses towards the church on a hill above the village. We kept biking 1/2 mile past the village having found no road to get up to the church. We approached a house where a young woman was outside directing a car as it attempted to back out of her driveway. I stopped and said, "Hello, my great-grandfather was born in Knockando." She said, "Wow, come in I'll take you over to my neighbor Violet who is 77 years old and has lived here her whole life." So we all got off our bikes. We look a rough group anyway, but having camped and biked in rain we weren't the type of people an eldery woman welcomes into her home, but there we were and she was offering us tea and as I started pulling out family trees she started thinking of neighbors and people that might be related or might know more.
When I had spoken to a few older Scots in a pub the day before and told them I had come from the Gilberts and the Davidsons, they all reacted as if I were related to some dog-kicking fugitive, supposedly the only Davidson they knew was some local neer do well that owed them all money, but Violet did know some Gilberts and she showed signs of distress when directing me towards them. I kept quiet about the Davidsons.
She told me I needed to bike three miles west to the Archiestown Post Office and speak to the postmaster Doreen Alridch who knows everyone in the area. With that we set out towards Archiestown. Clara and Jim set out for a distillery tour and EMily and I promised to come back and meet them after our visit to Doreen.
The 3 mile bike to Archiestown was filled with green dark treeless hills (munros in Gaelic) and sheep. When we first arrived in Scotland we had seen all these newspaper headlines that said in big bold print "Biker killed by sheep" and "Another biker victim to more sheep". This caused us to envision packs of killer sheep silently stalking bikers, waiting for the right moment to spring out and suffocate their two-wheeled prey with wads of wool and what not and then slowly chew them to death. We biked nervously those first few days, cautiously eyeing the mild seeming sheep behind short easily hopped stone walls, their slow chewing stares seemed omnious, their soft baa's and white fur thinly masking deep muderous impulses towards American educators (and their significant others). No one wanted to bike in the last position until we found out that Biker in English-ese is a motorcycist not a bicyclist and that the motorcyclists had died after striking stray sheep on mountain roads. This idiomatic lesson greatly relieved our sheep anxiety (a difficult condition in Scotland).
When we got to Archiestown we found a small village of about a thousand people. Doreen not only ran the post office as the sole employee but ran the only store in town. All this out of her 8 foot by 8 foot back porch. While I told her the history of my family she waited on customers buying steak pies, stamps and cigarettes. Violet had called ahead so Doreen was prepared. She listed off some people who might be distant relations (complete with phone numbers), found our family in a book called The Land and People of Moray 1835 and then asked if I had been to my Great grandfathers farm. I did not know about this, but the farm or croft he and the Gilberts lived on (Campbells Cairn) was still in existence a 1/2 mile out of town by the "sandheeps".
So after speaking to the wonderful Doreen for a little more time, Emily and I headed out to the farm. Suddenly next to a large green field surrounded by a stone wall was a small sign that said Campbell's Cairn. We left our bikes at the locked gate, climbed over the fence and walked up to an old stone house and barn. Sheep started to appear from everywhere and kindly escorted us to the door. Not knowing Scottish protocol I knocked loudly. An older alarmed looking man answered the door. The expression on his face showed that they rarely had visitors approach, and much less those wearing bike helmets. I explained why I was there and asked if I could look around and he said he was only caretaking the place for the owners and sure I could look around and then he closed the door and watched us from behind the drapes. So we walked around, looked at the fields, pet the sheep, took some photos and left knowing where I could find the great Gilbert clan 120 years ago.
There's a few more details, but I'll save those for another day with family. Em and I rode back, found Clara and Jim and continued on our journey following the Spey (a famous fly fishing river) towards Grantown.
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