NOTHING VIRTUAL OR VIRAL ABOUT THIS WALK.

At last. Wee Nic has agreed that we can meet up in greater numbers than before, so long as we are outside. Given we are a walking group, being outside is just the place for the Dinosaurs. Don't tell anyone, but we were slightly over the permitted numbers - 15 people from no more than 5 households. We were 12 people from 7 households. I think the reduction in overall numbers would be enough to offset the higher number of households. This is especially true when you consider that three households live in the same street and two of the others are next door neighbours!

It still being a tricky time, we took precautions to ensure that households did not share cars and most people could walk to our house to start the walk. 

Sounds scientific to me. I'll just follow that advice because it suits my purpose.

Anyway, we all banded together outside our garage - a Garage Band, no less. I did look up up garage bands to see if I could find a Dinosaur reference, but no luck. I had not realised that garage music dates from the mid sixties and some predates the Beatles! I thought it was an off shoot of Nirvana, or something like that.

There were a few garage band names that were quite bizarre.

The Stumbling Blox

The Caretakers of Deception - what a name that is.

Dr Spec's Optical Illusion

The Human Beinz

The Kitchen Cinq

The Pretty Things - I actually had one of their LPs.

Question Mark and the Mysterians

Teddy and his Patches

The Unrelated Segments 

However, I digress. Liz is making sure that nobody gets within 2 metres of her. Maureen is happy with that and the car is not seen as a carrier. Well, of course it is a people carrier. Well not a people carrier in the sense of a people carrier more in the sense of a car that carries people.

To carry on the car analogy, social distancing was gone in sixty seconds, despite Sharon having a wee cough.

So, having completely ignored Wee NIc's advice, we set off in a group up Caulfield Road South. The road is erroneously named after Major Caulfeild, of whom we will hear more later. It is also known as  Bramble Lane and for a very long time before that it was known as Cockleshell Lane. I cannot trace any reason for that, although the shoreline would have been much further inland at one time than it is now. As an aside, there is a wee burn running down the west side of the road. The Scretan Burn runs from up beside the Drumossie Hotel down past our house and out to the Retail Park and then into the sea. Scretan comes from the Gaelic Sgriodan, meaning stony ravine. Stoneyfield (Scriodan-sgrad in old Gaelic) , near the Retail Park derives from the same root.

We crossed Culloden Road, then into the Birchwood Housing scheme and then into the woods that the scheme were named after. Until recently, we had never been in this woodland. It really is very nice and has a good range of different broad-leaved trees.

Some of which are falling over.

And some of which have actually hit the ground. This one may have landed on an unfortunate sheep, but more likely the sheep are using the tree as a scratching post. I could have gone to collect the wool on the ground, but apparently there is no point as sheep's wool is currently worthless. Farmers are shearing sheep and using the fleece as fertiliser as it costs more to take it to market than it fetches at sale. I expect Brexit will sort that out.

Some sheep, blissfully unaware that they are carrying nothing around on their backs. Gives a whole new meaning to being fleeced.

Whilst it might seem we were walking through a nice native wood, there were invaders about. This is Honeysuckle. You would think that with a name like that it was a nice thing. Unfortunately, this is Lonicera japonica - native to Japan and eastern Asia. It is very invasive and crowds out native shrubs and even trees. It smells nice, though and you can eat the very sweet flowers, but not the rest of the plant. It actually looks really exotic and humming birds do gather nectar from other varieties of honeysuckle in the Americas.

Talking of plants as food, we came across seething masses of black caterpillars feasting on nettle leaves. These are the caterpillars of the beautiful Peacock Butterfly

Here's a Peacock Butterfly in our garden. The difference between the caterpillars and the butterfly could hardly be more marked. It just goes to show that Black Caterpillars Matter.

More wildlife - and a cow that even Pam is not frightened of. 

We were at the highest point on the walk - 120 metres above sea level. This afforded us some pretty good views over Inverness and to the hills and countryside beyond.

There was a really nice view of the Kessock Bridge and over the Black Isle to Ben Wyvis.

So off we set down the old A9, bunched up as if it was January 2020.

There is a bit of a classic view on this part of the road with the Scots Pine framing it on the left. When you see that on your way home from the south, you know it is not long before the kettle will be on. However, we were only just starting, really, and it would be a while until the kettle was on for us.

Next a bit of dicing with death, running across the A9. When Drumossie Brae was the A9, there was a road leading directly from the trunk road into the agricultural land to the west. The "new" A9 cut that road and the current path we took replaced that old right of way. It is very difficult to extinguish a right of way, but you can make alternative arrangements, such as a "path" across a high speed dual carriageway.

Once safely across, we got some more fine views to the north and west.

My, how we admired them. 

This is what they were looking at.

There did seem to be a bit of confusion as to where the view was, though.

Oh! I think we've got it. Well maybe we have except for Liz and Pam.

More social distancing in action. At least Liz made an attempt to get some clean air. 

 At our age, some might say it is all downhill, and here we are approaching the bottom.

The fine architectural features of Aldi.

Recognising the frailties of ladies of a certain age, we stopped at Tesco for a comfort break. Maureen broke the habit of the walk to arrange some socially distanced peppermint creams - untouched by human hand.

No, this is not the way in which Coronavirus entered the country. We let it in by other, much more direct, routes. These routes are where walkers, cyclists and wheelers can safely and easily access health facilities and other important workplaces during the pandemic, while allowing for social distancing.

We followed one of these routes to downtown Noo Yoick, where the kids were down in the hood. They was rapping and bunny hopping, nose and tail whipping them wheels like dey was real masters.

We escaped the Bronx across the Golden Bridge.

We seemed to walk across the Bifrost towards a looming Ragnarok.

I am sure that most of you will know, without me telling you, that Bifrost is the Shimmering Rainbow Bridge that connects the realm of the Norse gods to the realm of the humans. At the time of Ragnarok, which is the end of everything, the Fire Giants cross the bridge and destroy the old gods. The bridge falls away as the Giants walk across. Happily that didn't happen this time.

Like a thread running through the story, here is the A9 again.

Despite all the foreboding of Bifrost, we seem to have landed in some more Elysian land. This may sound good, but there is a catch. The Elysian Fields are where the specially chosen or historic ones go after they die. They live a perfectly happy afterlife. Great, you might think, but they do so by doing whatever work they did when they were alive. Who wants to go back to work after you have retired?

It wasn't Elysium, but Academia, or the UHI Campus. Academia was named after the guy who cut Plato's grass, Akademos.

We were quite near the Covid testing centre at this point. They would have had a fit if they had seen this social distancing

Cor! Luv a Duck!

 Lunch time and we had picked specially distanced pods with little benches, but everyone piled into the same pod, so that we could huddle together out of the suddenly cool wind.

Remarkably, Sue, Charlie and their grandchildren James and Molly joined us for a little while. They were looking for scraps, but I don't think they got anything from the hungry dinosaurs.

 I did wonder why Jimmy looked a little ethereal and almost saintly in this photo. Turns out there was a smudge on the lens.

After lunch and we had another retail park to visit.

In keeping with the mythological theme that seems to have developed, we passed by Yggdrassill, the home of the Norns, who control the fate of all men.

Here they are.

Sometimes, things become clearer, the closer you look. Sometimes, not.

SSnakeSS in the graSS.

 Into every life a little rain must fall. 

But it didn't last. Well, not then, anyway.

We were now walking up the lane towards Ashton Farm. The farmhouse has two fine Marriage Stones dating from 1669 at the gateway to the house. One of these has a rose at the top...

...the other has a thistle, suggesting that the marriage being celebrated was between an English and a Scottish couple. Our on the spot informant told us that the stones were ploughed up in a nearby field and that there was reference to a castle having been there at one time. I cannot find any reference to this at all. Sounds good, though.

There were lots of nice flowers at the farmhouse, including some pretty spectacular begonias. i didn't take a photo of these because, as Pam said at the time, Sharon doesn't like begonias. I have no idea why she has such an irrational hatred of them, but there is so much about Sharon that I neither know or understand.

You might think that Begonias are fairly innocuous and pretty to look at, but there is a bit of a darker side to them, which might explain Sharon's antipathy.

There is one hybrid cultivar begonia known as Kimjongilia. If you think you might have heard the name somewhere, you would be right. It was developed by a Japanese botanist for the 46th birthday in 1988 of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-il. His father Kim Il-sung has an orchid named after him. It does seem a little odd to have pretty flowers named after two of the worst dictators in the world. No doubt, the current dictator, Kim Jong-un, will have some form of floral tribute in the future. 

Some rams with a view.

Maureen peering into a tree.

Actually, it was a little fairy world.

At the top of Ashton Farm Lane, we turned into Resaurie. The name derives from An Ruigh Samraidh - a summer pasture. Cattle would have been grazed here in the summer months.

That would have been in the days before the railway came to town.

In fact, the railway came to town twice. The original train line into Inverness from Perth came via Forres. The direct line through Aviemore arrived in 1898, the year before my Granny was born! No doubt the bridge at Resaurie was built about the same year.

The next point of interest was Cradlehall Farmhouse. This was where Major Caulfeild lived. Yes, the spelling is correct - he was an e before i rather than the other way around. All the Caulfield roads, crescents, avenues and streets have got it wrong.

He was a British Army officer and became Inspector of Roads in Scotland in 1732, working for General Wade. He was also a bit well connected, being the grandson of the First Viscount Charlemont, also William Caulfeild. 

Caulfeild was also a much more prolific builder than General Wade, indeed, a lot of the roads that people associate with Wade, were built by Caulfeild. He built 900 miles of roads and over 600 bridges - Wade built 250 miles of road and 40 bridges, although he also managed 2 forts.

The local word is that Cradlehall is called Cradlehall, because, Major Caulfield liked to entertain on a prodigious scale. So much so, that his guests were frequently incapable of getting to bed and, so, he had a cradle installed to lift them up the stairs to the sleeping quarters - hence cradle hall. If that is not true, I wish it was.

Just along from the house we turned up through some woods to the back of the Cradlehall shops. Unremarkable, you might think. However, the woods are now where Major Caulfeild's army barracks were sited. The barracks were still standing in 1911!

After that, we were back where we started, ready for a cup of tea and some of Sharon's excellent home baking. Unfortunately it started to rain. Fortunately we had anticipated that and there was a degree of shelter available in the garden for most of us. There were a couple of unfortunate incidents with water and necks.

It didn't stop us enjoying the end of the day as much as we could in the circumstances.

 Hugh could easily have nipped home for a cup of tea in his warm, dry home but chose to stay with his walking companions.

It was pretty damned wet, but we had avoided it on the walk, which was good. It was also good to get a walk in the first place after such a long time. It was great to see everyone and, whilst it may not have been exactly the sort of walk we are used to, it was good fun and interesting. Hopefully, we will get an even better outing in August.