Heading out of town we stopped at a memorial. Two councilors were discussing the landscaping to brighten it up. It's a memorial to the 2006 Nimrod crash in Kandahar, Afghanistan, killing all fourteen crew members on board. The airmen were based at the nearby Kinloss RAF base.
Kinloss was our next stop. Nowadays its an army base.
We took a look around the ruins of Kinloss Abbey which is amazing and quite poignant. Founded in 1150 by King David the 1st of Scotland, as well as the old ruins there are lines of Commonwealth war graves of airmen from the UK, Canada and the Australian and New Zealand air forces.
From Kinloss we took a run down to the dunes at Findhorn. The ecovillage looked very busy as we passed.
Our next port of call was the tiny village of Kintessack.
Back in Inverness we headed north across the Kessock Bridge onto the Black Isle then across the Cromarty Bridge to get to Invergordon.
After turning off the A9 at Alness, we pulled into a quiet looking yard overlooking the Cromarty Firth. We immediately wondered what the pungent but not unpleasant smell was and we started laughing when we realised we were sitting above a distillery, it felt like we were getting drunk from the fumes! (well I was)
A little further down the road we saw the entrance, the name on the gate said Dalmore Distillery. A bottle of the Dalmore Constellation Collection 1976 from Fortnum and Mason will only set you back £9,250.
On we went then to Invergordon and saw all the oil rigs in the Cromarty. We always seem to end up at somewhere very industrial! - oil refineries, now this! the industrial just seems to draw me for some reason.
We ate fish and chips watching a shift change at the Port of Cromarty before returning to our hotel in Inverness.
A few night pictures along the River Ness.
The photos are not in sequential order!
from Scotia
