Scotland Road Trip: Edinburgh to Grantown-on-Spey (Day 3)

Linlithgow Palace as seen from one of its towers.

UPDATED: 2/5/2023

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We left Edinburgh first thing in the morning and drove about 45 minutes west of town to Linlithgow Palace, situated about a block up the street from the main downtown of the small town of Linlithgow. This palace is definitely one of the top highlights of our trip.

Touring Linlithgow Palace and Town

We arrived at the palace at about 9:45am, just 15 minutes after their opening time, and were able to score one of the very few parking spots in front of the entrance. This small parking lot fills up quickly and can get jam packed with any tour shuttles very quickly so if you are arriving other than first thing in the morning, you may need to find another spot in town to park.

Just inside the entrance is a little gift shop on the left where we purchased our tickets. Only a couple of other visitors were there so we essentially had private run of the place for a good while. We chatted with the friendly gift shop employee, who shared that she and the others who work in the shop use a map to track which US states and other countries their visitors come from. She was disappointed that we were Virginians since they’d already crossed that state off for the year. She shared that they start this game over each calendar year and see how many months it takes to get all 50 states and that the prior year, they had reached that goal by March or April.

You begin your Linlithgow adventure by walking into the central courtyard.

Take time to check out the many (many) figures represented on the Linlithgow fountain.

The central courtyard fountain is an intense piece of art.

Linlithgow Palace: a brief history

Linlithgow Palace sits perched on the banks of Linlithgow Loch (for those unfamiliar, a loch is a lake) surrounded by beautiful Scottish countryside. One unique feature of Linlithgow is that it was built as an actual palace for a luxurious royal home. Most other ruins and castles were primarily built for fortification purposes instead of as palaces. Linlithgow’s emergence into the palace it is today happened like many things throughout history - piecemeal and over time, as different monarchs took on building projects. As early as the 12th century, a royal residence was situated on this spot, but the current building form came into being around 1425 when James I put his mark on the spot. The building wasn’t finished until James IV completed it around 1503 as a home for his new bride, Margaret of England, a match meant to help establish a better relationship between the oft-warring nations.

James IV and Margaret’s son, James V, was born at the residence. James V was father to Mary, Queen of Scots, who also was born at Linlithgow in 1542. This is also the place where Mary spent some of her last time in the country before she was exiled to England and awaited her eventual execution many years later. By 1633, this beautiful palace had fallen into disrepair and was not much used. Charles I visited that year after extensive preparations to make it king-worthy, and he was the last royal to sleep there.

Since that time, the palace has been used for a variety of activities including being the meeting place for Scottish parliament as late as 1646 and was briefly occupied by the English Duke of Cumberland as he sought Jacobites in the mid 1700s. It was his stay that led to some destruction of the property and the roof, leaving the once-home of kings and queens in ruins. Today, the site is used as a film set for Outlander, where it is portrayed as Wentworth Prison.

Spiral staircases abound in Scotland’s castles.

Venture up to the top of Linlithgow’s towers for a great view of the area.

Trying to imagine what the palace looked like with floors and ceilings.

Loch Linlithgow and countryside beyond. What a view!

How many footfalls are required to wear stone steps down like this?

Narrow stone corridors connect rooms within the palace.

Linlithgow palace: what to expect

As we entered from the entrance gate, we found ourselves in the courtyard, open to the sky and centered by The King’s Fountain, an ornately decorated fountain that was a gift from James V in 1538 to his new bride Mary of Guise, mother to Mary, Queen of Scots. At first, the palace seemed fairly small, a deceiving feeling. With the four sides visible from the courtyard and four towers in each corner, we had free reign of the place.

Other than one of the four sides that is not safe to enter except on some portions of the ground floor, visitors are free to explore the meandering hallways and rooms. Each of the towers in the corner houses a curved stone stairwell that in its heyday would have permitted roof access. Today, while visitors can use the staircases, only one opens up to the roof level. That one is in the back left when coming in the entrance. The top of that stairwell spits visitors out to the open air which provides beautiful views of the loch and surrounding countryside and provides a vantage point to view (and photograph) the palace from above. It was also interesting to view the construction of the roof and stonework set to aid irrigation from rainfall.

Dustin looks down on the courtyard trying (and failing) to imagine what life would have been like before the palace burned down.

Looking into the courtyard from the once royal apartments.

Pillars and arches support the weight of the roof and floor above.

In exploring the castle, visitors will find the bedroom of the royals, which had a balcony with a view of the loch, and some original tiled flooring - while not in the greatest shape in the roofless building. Scattered throughout the palace are placards with information and visual depictions. To give you just a taste of the building, it houses a slightly subterranean storeroom, an enormous great hall with the fireplace visible as well as the second story overlook within the room, and a series of basement kitchens that are accessible down a dark stairwell.

In that subterranean basement kitchen, it was nearly pitch dark. A couple of kids had come running back up as I was headed down excitedly telling a story to their mom about how a bird had flown at them in the dark and how they had thought it was a ghost. I chuckled and continued down and am so glad I heard that story so I could be on the look-out. When I was down there, there was a pigeon that was likely protecting eggs or something that flew up unexpectedly and was quite startling!

Touring and exploring the ruins on our own time was really fascinating. As a group of four, we ended up going our separate ways - not particularly purposefully, but just each following the path that appealed to us. Every so often, we would get a glimpse of each other or cross paths and share tips - Did you see the great hall yet? - which would give us a sense of how much was left to explore. We spent probably about 90 minutes at Linlithgow Palace and decided at that time we needed to move on given the rest of our plans for the day. Towards the end of our visit, a few small shuttle buses started showing up, and I do think part of what made our experience interesting was that we could lose ourselves in the building without seeing other people for a while at a time. Definitely try to go when it isn’t crowded!

Did you know spiral staircases were designed as a form of security? By curving them in a certain direction, sword-toting soldiers within the building had an advantage over those trying to enter.

Be sure to make your way up Linlithgow’s towers for an amazing view of Loch Linlithgow.

A few spiders and many birds live in Linlithgow today.

Looking up through a “keyhole” at one of the ruined towers of Linlithgow.

Hope you don’t get dizzy! The only ways up or down in Linlithgow are long spiral staircases.

The old front gates of Linlithgow are now unused and overlook a roughly 20 foot drop with no access point except from the inside.

This Great Hall was massive, check out the three fireplaces along the front wall. On the right, you can see a second story overlook into the room.

Lunch at the four marys

From the palace, it was a short walk into town - probably the equivalent of three city blocks. There is a cute central part of the down just outside of the palace gates and just across the street is The Four Marys, a pub where we decided to eat lunch.

I initially assumed that at least one of those four Marys must be Mary, Queen of Scots, but not-a-one! When Mary, Queen of Scots, left Scotland as a child to go to France in 1548 (where she would eventually marry Francis II, during his brief reign and early death), she was accompanied by four ladies-in-waiting, all named Mary. This pub is an homage to Mary’s friends and confidants. If you want to read more about their lives and stories, there is an interesting article on the BBC History website: Mary, Queen of Scots: what Happened to her ladies-in-waiting?

Like many of the old buildings housing restaurants in Scotland, the decor and architecture created a cozy ambiance. In what to me was a bit of an odd choice for a dining establishment, a photograph of Mary’s death mask (there is some debate as to its authenticity) was hanging on the wall nearby. If you want to see what the image looks like and read more about Mary’s supposed death mask and the practice in general, you can check out this article.

Dustin ordered the standard go-to pub fare of fish and chips, and I had a melted tuna sandwich on delicious sourdough bread. After lunch we stopped in at a coffee shop called the Coffee Neuk across the street to get some energy for a drive north.

Tasty pub food can be found at The Four Marys, a short walk from the castle.

Road trip from Linlithgown to Cairngorms National Park

The drive north took about 2.5 hours and was our first foray outside of the more populated area around Edinburgh after we crossed a bridge over the Firth of Forth, the estuary that is the confluence of four rivers immediately north of Edinburgh. The route we took passed the outskirts of the city of Perth and then entered the vicinity of the Cairngorms, Scotland’s second national park and largest national park. Cairngorms contains mountains by the same name.

With the day having flown by much faster than we had expected, we only had about an hour for the final stop we planned to make that day along the drive - the open-air Highland Folk Museum.

Do you see the wolf in the tree? Probably a prop… but it’s not?!?

visiting the highland folk museum in the cairngorms

Billed as the United Kingdom’s first open-air museum, the Highland Folk Museum opened in this spot in 1944 but had previously started in 1935 on Iona. As the collection grew, the founders sought a more permanent space, which is what led to the folk museum in its present location.

There is no entrance fee, though donations are welcome (we made one). Stretched over a mile in length, the site seeks to show life in Scotland spanning from the 1700s to the middle of the 20th century. Given the limited time we had before close, we were only able to view some of the site. We headed for the older portion of a recreated thatched roof village. To access it, there are several meandering forested paths, which were beautiful short hikes in and of themselves.

For those Outlander fans among you, this village was used to film episode 5 in the first season where the characters visited a village to collect rent for the clan. Believe it or not, we did not realize there was an association with the show until we visited the site, and I actually recognized it from the show.

There were several museum docents in the village, who were very friendly and knowledgeable. Since we were the only visitors at that time in that part of the open-air museum, we had their full attention. We learned that the village was modeled on an actual site that had been located a few miles away, though the actual village had been several times larger. The insides of the short stone wall and low-hanging thatched roof homes were incredibly dark. For some of the photos I took, I literally just held my camera out, took a photo, and by looking on the screen of my camera was able to see what was in front of me.

Hippity hop! While many of us in America see rabbits as a cute pet, they are considered a delicious meal in Scotland and many other countries.

The path to the oldest village at the Highland Folk Museum was a pleasant and low difficulty walk through the woods.

It was nearly pitch black in this traditional Scottish house. Even with the shutter wide open this was all the camera could see.

Chickens in Scotland certainly are much fluffier (and better insulated) than their American counterparts.

Our first glimpse at a traditional Scottish house circa 1700’s.

Looking at the underside of a traditional Scottish roof gives you an idea about how they were constructed.

With temperatures around 70 degrees, our pit-stop at the Highland Folk Museum was a wonderful diversion from our long car ride.

What the docents explained is that the houses we were seeing represented different strata of the social classes at the time: the largest house belonged to the tax collector, who worked on behalf of the owner of the land (the laird). Next to it was another home that would have belonged to a family doing okay financially and could afford animals, most often cows. They wouldn’t have eaten the meat themselves but would have used them as a source of income, selling the beef. Because the cows were so important financially, inside the home on one end was a bit of a stone recess and barn area so that the family could bring the cows inside for protection during the cold winter. To be clear: these are not large homes and to have them filled with a family and some cows would have been quite a collection, probably quite a smelly one at that. Further down the hill was another house that would have been for the less well-off village residents who would have been laborers.

In additional to learning the above from the docents, we had some interesting conversations about the Highland Clearances, a dark memory in Scotland where (in short) the lairds kicked tenants off the land and out of their homes to make way for grazing land. While the lairds have been maligned throughout history for these actions, more modern interpretations suggest that while the Clearances were horrific and sometimes brutal for those impacted, the larger economic forces in Scotland essentially forced this movement towards a more recognizably modern economy.

We learned that many of these people who had to leave during the Clearances and had been the families with the cows found their way to America and became some of the early cowboys, using their steer managing skills in a new way and new land. Names like Dallas and Chisolm are Scottish names that came with them.

A traditional Scottish doorway sporting a tartan.

The Cairngorms are an interesting mix of mountains, rocks, and boggy marshes, which creates a very unique ecosystem.

Grantown-on-Spey

We were shooed out of the Highland Folk Museum as it started to close and hit the road again for a 40-minute drive to our final destination of the day and the place where we would spend two nights - Firhall Bed & Breakfast in the tiny town of Grantown-on-Spey (Spey being the river that passes through town).

On our way, we drove through the town of Aviemore, which appeared to be the main tourist destination in the area. The main street was dotted with shops and reminded us of a ski resort town. We were happy we had chosen a smaller spot for our stay.

The owners of Firhall, couple Stuart and James, provided us a warm welcome in town, provided helpful recommendations on spots to eat (it was already dinner time), and recommended a nice after dinner walk along the river. Before heading out for the evening, we made our breakfast selections - a difficult choice from enticing options - and also elected to order prepared picnic lunches that the B&B offers (at an additional cost) for the following day since we planned to hike in the Cairngorms.

The town of Grantown-on-Spey is very small and walkable. Within a short walking distance were several restaurants, a food market, an ATM, walking trails, and anything else the town offered. A few blocks away from the B&B is The Craig Bar, which is where we headed for dinner.

This small pub and bar fills up quickly most nights, so it is recommended to call ahead for reservations, which we did. Their (meat) pies are to die for. Dustin ordered a chicken and mushroom pie, and the other three of us all had the glorious "Moo and Blue” (steak and stilton blue cheese). The pies are made-to-order, so there is a little bit of a wait, and it’s important to note that the bar only takes cash. The good news is that the trip to the ATM is walkable while your pie is being made if you didn’t plan in advance! We sipped on some beers while waiting in the over-the-top military decor of the pub.

It is worth noting that the owner of the pub is a bit of a personality (this is an understatement). He has strong political and social views that he is not afraid to share widely with patrons and which would generally be considered offensive to most people and are not commonly stated so out in the open - for example, he will make lewd comments and gestures about homosexuality that he thinks he is doing in jest (vs angrily). On TripAdvisor (read here), there are lots of reviews that refer to this owner, many of which describe him as a ‘hoot,’ others of which are more critical. We heard some of this commentary first-hand and also experienced him refusing to allow us to tip our server the amount we had wanted to (tipping in Scotland is different than in the US, which we had factored in, and it was quite shocking to have the owner pull money out of the hands of the server and return it to us). The food was second-to-none in this area with few restaurants, but we feel that it is appropriate to make people aware of the situation they are walking into if they visit.

Sunset was a great time for a walk along River Spey.

The thistle is the official flower of Scotland.

Enjoying the last rays of sunlight along River Spey.

After dinner, we easily located the path that meandered out to the River Spey and had a nice walk through the woods and along the river’s edge as the sun was getting lower in the sky, quite late so far north at mid-summer. There were a number of hawthorn trees in the woods, a beautifully flowering tree that is regarded in Ireland as being a meeting place for fairies, so they are treated with reverence and people avoid cutting them down.

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