We were up early on purpose. Midhope Castle, better known to a certain kind of household as Lallybroch, is easy to reach and therefore easy to overrun, so we got there as close to opening as we could manage. It mostly worked. There were still tripods set up and people dancing in the archway recreating shots for their followers, but nothing like what it becomes later in the day.
Contrary to everything I had read, you can now go inside. The ground floor has been opened up with the tower open above you and a small exhibition telling the story of the place, with a heavy and entirely understandable lean toward Outlander. There is an Outlander family tree on the wall which is exactly as difficult to follow as any Outlander fan would expect, because time travel does unhelpful things to a family line.
It also feels far more remote than I had braced for. I expected a car park and a gift shop empire. Instead it is a working farm, and the resident Highland coos came over to the fence, including a calf, which the girls were far more interested in than any tower house.
The castle itself is a late 16th century tower house, remodelled in 1587 by Alexander Drummond of Midhope. That name stopped me. Doig is a sept of Clan Drummond, out of Perthshire, and that is us. The Drummonds were given those Perthshire lands by Robert the Bruce after Bannockburn, where a Malcolm Drummond is credited with scattering caltrops across the field to break the English cavalry. We had been standing on that ground the day before. So there we were, walking around a house a Drummond rebuilt four hundred and forty years ago, under a name that came off the same Perthshire ground. I did not expect to find any of ours on this trip, and certainly not by accident, on the way to look at a television location.
The castle was later used to house farm workers for the Hopetoun estate. In 1851 there were 53 people living in it. Then it was abandoned and left to fall apart, and now it is famous for being somebody's fictional home.
We considered Blackness Castle but decided the girls were approaching castle fatigue, so we took a slow countryside drive into Fife instead and landed in Falkland, which is one of the loveliest small towns we have seen anywhere. Bunting strung across the square, a church spire, a crow-stepped estate building on the corner, and the Bruce Fountain in the middle. Falkland played 1940s Inverness in Outlander, and the fountain is where Jamie's ghost stands looking up at Claire's window. The window is right there in the Covenanter Hotel, which is where we had lunch and a couple of pints. Katherine tried her first Irn Bru and loved it. We got talking to some Australians, and while I was waiting in the hallway a staff member asked if I needed anything. I said they were probably well used to seeing men standing around waiting. She chuckled and agreed.
We had meant to eat at the Pillars of Hercules, an organic farm, cafe and campsite just outside the town that has been going since 1983. The cafe turned out to be mostly pre-made rather than a sit down, so we skipped the food and wandered the grounds instead, which was worth it anyway. We met a woman from Eastern Europe with a dog Mirin fell instantly in love with. She had rescued it off the streets in Romania and decided to take it with her while she spends the next few years travelling around Europe and the UK. Best story of the day by a distance.
Then north, several hours toward the real Inverness, and the first bad news of the trip. Fires in the Cairngorms have closed the reindeer hill trip for a few days, for the safety of visitors and of the herd. That was tomorrow. The Cairngorm herd is the only free-ranging herd of reindeer in Britain, and the guided walk up to hand feed them was one of the things we had most looked forward to. The rebooking window falls several days out, by which time we will be on the A87 heading for Skye.
We rolled into Auchnahillin Holiday Park in the evening, after a slightly bittersweet drive into the Highlands. The girls went straight for the playground and then joined a group of other children playing football on the green. Wine helped. So did the reminder that we were sitting in good weather, in Scotland, with our feet up. All is well.
