Today we headed north over the Kessock bridge and river Ness and out towards Cromarty, our first stop was Avoch which is a harbour village on the Moray Firth. It was a stronghold during the war of independence, and the birthplace of Sir Alexander Mackenzie who subsequently explored Canada and after whom the Mackenzie river was named. We drove around the village and then onto Fortrose where the lighthouse opposite Fort George is, this provided great views of the fort and is also a place where it is virtually guaranteed that you will see Dolphins, there were a number of people on the spit by the lighthouse, some with quite serious looking cameras and binoculars, unfortunately despite this we didn’t see any sign of dolphins so we got back in the car to continue onto Cromarty.
This is a wonderful fishing village that is all higgledy piggledy with houses seeming to be built in each other’s gardens. The bay of Cromarty is a naturally deep harbour and it is where all the oil rigs are either stored or maintained, it is very strange driving down into the harbour and there being a line of oil rigs in front of you. We arrived mid-morning but none of the museums opened until noon so we decided to take a walk up to South Sutor to see if we could spot any Dolphins which should be in the area. The walk to the point at South Sutor is about a mile and a half each way and the last part was quite steep but worth it in the end as the view out to the sea was spectacular and for once it wasn’t too windy so we sat looking out to sea, again unfortunately although we had a few false attempts we didn’t see any Dolphins. We decided to head back and finally we spotted some, there were 3 very close in to shore jumping out of the water – at last we have been lucky. By the time we had watched the Dolphins for a while the Court House museum was open so we went inside, the building had been both the Court house and gaol, (it also had the town clock) and it was in use up until the the 19th century and they had a mock up of a court trial from the mid 1700’s. They had some interesting displays and a book of photos taken of the townsfolk in the early 1900’s, they were quite remarkable. We then headed back down to the shore and sat and had lunch and returned to Inverness. We went out for a walk this evening as it is really nice out again, we walked round to Montague Row to look at Aunty Mables place to be honest I don’t really remember the house very well but I do remember the brick colouring! We then came back to the cottage and relaxed before starting again tomorrow.
