OL49: Aberfeldy

OS Explorer map OL49, Pitlochry & Loch Tummel: Aberfeldy, Kinloch Rannoch & Schiehallion – I do not own this map, and had not visited it before starting this blog. Visited for this post 17th May 2024.

Map area link. Google Maps location links: Edinburgh, Aberfeldy, Ballinluig, Killiecrankie

---

I came to this map area for my friend Geochunderer’s stag party. Though we were at school together in Northamptonshire, he went off to university in Aberdeen, then settled in Glasgow; so off to Scotland it was for this event!

Travelling up & the first day

The plan for the journey up was that I’d meet up in Edinburgh with fellow school friends Cabbage and Climbing Programmer, the latter of whom lives in Edinburgh and would then drive us up in his car. I got in to Edinburgh Airport at about 5:30pm, but Cabbage wouldn’t be arriving for another four hours, so I travelled to Climbing Programmer’s house on public transport to hang around there for a bit. I got the tram into the city centre – not actually a great option, since it’s slightly slower and a couple of pounds more expensive than the Airport Express bus, but I like trams and I thought a bus might be more likely to suffer rush hour delays at this time.

Between arriving in central Edinbugh and hopping on the bus down to Climbing Programmer’s house in a southern suburb, I popped in to a branch of Primark and bought some very cheap trainers. The reason for this is that I’d only noticed while travelling up that the email containing details of our activities for the next day said that we should bring an old pair of trainers that we don’t mind getting wet, for the watersports-y activity (more on that later). Never mind having forgotten to bring any such, I don’t even own any trainers, so a £10 Primark pair it was!

I then headed down to Climbing Programmer’s house, and we had a relaxed couple of hours sitting around, chatting and eating some cheesy vegetable gnocchi he’d cooked up. [1] I also bought some temporary insurance for myself on his car, so that I could drive us back on Sunday morning if he was still hung over. I thought it was very reasonably priced at £25 for the weekend!

We dutifully picked up Cabbage at around 10pm and made the hour-and-a-half drive up to Aberfeldy, arriving a little before midnight.  The other twelve or so people had already been there several hours and were sitting about chatting with drinks, having been playing some stag-themed party games earlier in the evening. I joined them for an hour or so before heading off to bed, very late for me!

Digression the first: accommodation

Our accommodation was three cottages in the Moness Resort on the edge of Aberfeldy, a holiday venue of a kind I haven’t encountered before, with several dozen holiday cottages all clustered very close together on the same site – a lot of them were terraces around a courtyard, making me wonder whether they were converted from something older, except that the buildings didn’t look very old and were very conveniently set-up for being holiday cottages, as if they were new-builds – together with also a hotel, a couple of restaurants, and a spa/pool area. I’m familiar with holiday parks of the Centerparcs or Butlins variety, which seem oriented at people coming and spending their whole trip, more or less, on the grounds; but this place seemed to have the accommodation setup of somewhere like that, but without all the activities and grounds, so I assume people mostly use it as a base to then go out exploring in the area.

Digression the second: genderedness of stag parties

It was a mixed stag party – i.e. still with only the groom-to-be’s friends rather than those of both partners, but including his women friends as well as men, which makes a lot of sense to me. My own friends certainly don’t divide up neatly by gender and it’d feel very weird to only invite half of them. I’m a bit confused as to why it’s still the norm to have single-gender stag parties. I always think of it being a thing of my parents’ generation or older for people to have mainly same-gendered friends, or other similar things, like being mostly friends with couples and then the men having a very different kind of relationship with each other than the women; it feels to me like most of my peers have friends in a pretty gender-agnostic way. But the persistence of single-gendered stag and hen parties feels like it implies otherwise. I can’t really imagine holding one myself, so I suppose either other people have more gender-regarding social groups; or they have a stronger sense of “male-only is what a stag party is”, so it’s not weird to leave out half of your friends? Not sure what’s going on there.

The main day

The Saturday was the main day of the event, and we headed off at about 9am to the venue for our first activity, namely paintballing. Not really my thing, but it was fine, and plenty of the others seemed to be enjoying themselves. I was only shot from fairly long range, five or so times, none of which left a mark, which is definitely much more lightly than many others got off, several people having a lot of very visible circular welts for the rest of the weekend.

It was a hot day, about 19 degrees and sunny as we started and getting to about 24 by lunchtime. Normally I find heat really unpleasant; and especially if I’m doing anything physical and it’s sunny, I usually pretty quickly get a nasty prickly feeling that I need to hide in the shade, pour some water on myself, or use some cooling spray to recover from. Though usually after a while, say if I’m out walking on a warm day, I’ll somehow get into the swing of things after a little while and it’ll stop happening as much, which I’ve never really worked out. On this day, although I was definitely hot during the paintballing in a more normal way, somehow I didn’t get prickly and so assumed I wasn’t actually that warm; but then was surprised to take off my paintballing overalls at the end of the session and find my shirt wet through with sweat on the front and back! It really was rather warm.

After paintball (and changing my shirt), we headed over to the Nae Limits activity centre in Ballinluig for a buffet barbecue-like lunch before our afternoon activity. We were originally booked in to do white water rafting, but due to recent hot weather apparently the rivers were too low for that to be enjoyable, so the centre staff proposed we instead do tubing, namely floating down a river and going over rapids sitting in an inflated ring. We went with this, also choosing the more “family-friendly route” which’d be more towards the comfortable rather than the thrill-seeking end, which I was very much fine with!

We got into the provided wetsuits and life jackets, I covering up the flappy white label in my wetsuit with some duct tape to manage my irrational fear of those things – I’d said to Geochunderer’s friend organising the activities that I might have to pull out if the wetsuits have labels in, but he not only gave me the duct tape idea which worked a treat, but even brought his own label-less wetsuit so I’d have another option, which I greatly appreciated! It was then into a minibus for a short drive to Killiecrankie, where we were given our tubes, and carried them from the car park down to the River Garry.

It’s a really pretty area! The River Garry runs at this point in a deep forested gorge among hills, and we got to the bottom at a place where the river, at least at its water level at the time – which I understand was very low – does a fairly wide meander around a flat, pebbley beach. It’s a very idyllic setting, which combined with the hot day and there being a car park just up the path, made it a popular spot: there were a few groups in their swimwear sunbathing or lounging on the rocks.

Our guides then got us into the water. While I’d been approaching being seriously unpleasantly warm while walking down to the river – wearing a full-body black wetsuit on a hot sunny day will do that to you – as soon as we were into the water it was pleasantly cool. After an ungainly swim to the other side of the river – I didn’t quite work out how to do a smooth one in the wetsuit and buoyancy aid – the braver of us had a chance to climb up onto rocks at the river’s edge and jump in from progressively higher cliffs, going up to about thirty feet. I did the first, small one, and then opted to bob around with the other non-thrill-seekers. One of the guides then showed off his skills by dropping off an even higher one, backwards and doing some flips on the way down.

After that it was time for the tubing itself, which I have to say, I really enjoyed – just a relaxing float down the river in pleasant company, in a pretty area on a sunny day, and feeling pleasantly cool despite that sun. I’ve seen plenty of Highland river gorges from the top before, but never from this perspective. We floated down the river for about a mile and a half in our rings, with some little areas of rapids, though, as promised, nothing especially hair-raising. There were also some optional challenges, such as attempting to stand up on one’s ring, or swap rings with someone else, without falling in.

Our session ended at the Garry Bridge, which the guides were enthusiastically telling us has a platform under it from which people do bungee jumping and “bridge swing” – I don’t think I’ll be doing that anytime soon!

From there, it was back to the activity centre, changed out of the wetsuits, and back to the cottages for a couple of hours at leisure – and for me, showering and then getting into my third shirt of the day.

Dinner that evening was out at a pub: macaroni cheese (or just macaroni, as they say up here), chips and salad for me. Conversations at my table included me getting some walking advice: I’m planning to try a long walk in July, and had been wanting to do it as far north as possible to make it least likely it’d be too hot, but had ruled out Scotland due to expecting it to be too midgey. It was pointed out to me, though, that they’re a lot less bad in the Cairngorms than on the west coast; and that if camping, then in summer one choose to camp at altitude which also makes them less bad. So I may well try that. I also discovered that I had a very unexpected mutual acquaintance with someone, which was fun.

Geochunderer grew up in England with me and our other school friends, but moved up to Aberdeen for university, and has lived in Scotland ever since; so the substantial majority of the group were Scottish. Mildly awkwardly, I spent the weekend finding it really quite hard to resist dropping into a Scottish accent. I’m not in any way Scottish, and have never lived in Scotland (though I’ve probably spent a good five or six months there in aggregate over 25 or so trips). However, several years ago I had a Dungeons & Dragons character who I used to play with a Scottish accent – a reasonably good one, I like to think, but who knows. I hadn’t thought about for ages, but clearly it embedded the accent in me deeply enough within me that being surrounded by Scots means I have to actively resist getting it out!

After the pub, it was back to the house to sit around chatting with drinks, during which period one person got out some face paints and painted several people’s faces! I enjoyed the session of people playing back grainy late-noughties Scottish teenage Youtube videos; and the brief discussion, many of those there having gone to university in Aberdeen together, about Doric Scots. [4]

Digression the third: travel and language-learning

I like travelling, and I like it most of all when I’m travelling to places for which I have a lot of related context that I can draw on. The best bit of travel for me is seeing connections – being in a place and being able to link something I read on a sign to the history I already know, seeing a place name and identifying the elements; things like that. Which is why I love travelling in the UK most of all (and have a blog about it!) and am progressively less interested in going to further-flung places and more deeply unfamiliar cultures. Scotland is just such a great mix of the mostly familiar and the unfamiliar – close enough in history and and language and everything that there are connections everywhere; but unfamiliar enough that there are a lot of surprises, there’s a lot to learn, and a lot of just slightly harder things to work out while doing that learning. Which makes it a particularly rewarding travel experience for me. As well as travel, I have the same feeling with language-learning: I love it, but I love most learning languages related to those I already know, since one of the best bits is realising I already understand something because I know the cognates; seeing a word and realising the etymology; seeing a word used just a bit differently to its relatives but realising why it took that path; and so on.

Just talking to people at the weekend on this trip, I felt like I was just having the culture (rather than history or language) version of this feeling. Which really brought home to my how much I usually miss out on when travelling, by only learning by reading, looking at maps and signs and so on rather than talking to people. And just in life by nearly always only talking to people fairly similar to me. Not sure this is going to suddenly turn me into someone who does a lot more talking to new people – that might be rather a big step – but still, it was interesting to note.

---

And that was that really – after a couple of hours of that, I went off to bed, and set off home the next morning. I wasn’t all that sure going in whether I’d enjoy the weekend. A typical stag party – shouty, blokey and drunken, probably involving nightclubs and the like – is definitely not my thing. I knew going in that this weekend wouldn’t be like that; booking a house in the Scottish countryside and doing a mixed-gender event does relieve plenty of concerns, as does me just knowing my friend and not expecting he’d go in for anything too over-the-top. But still, I wasn’t sure what it’d be like socially; and I wasn’t sure about the activities either, knowing I’m not into paintball, and not really having tried any watersports before.

In the end though, it was very good! The river tubing was great, and I enjoyed the social aspect a lot too. Of the fifteen or so people there, there was Geochunderer himself, me and two other school friends, then about six of his old university friends whom I’d met once before some nine years ago for his 21st birthday weekend, [3] then another five people I hadn’t met, mostly his work friends. I just felt like I fitted in pretty well, like I could be friends with many of the people there.

Digression the fourth: socialising and getting to know people

I think at the moment I’m a bit below my ideal amount of socialising. I’m pretty introverted, and want a lot less social time than many people; I definitely value the time I spend completely alone, and am used to my main social preference being about needing to defend enough time for being alone. I think maybe my ideal would be something like an evening a week and a weekend a month for socialising – preferably with a good chunk of that being “deep” socialising – like spent with people I like in a setting where there’s plenty of space conducive to relaxed, long small-group conversations; such as sitting around in a house on an evening, or going on walks – but also shallower stuff can be good too. Over the last year or so, though I have been feeling distinctly under-socialised; which made this weekend nice for just being some additional nice social time.

However I also – and a few years ago I don’t think I’d have predicted at all that this’d be something I’d seek – at the moment feel like I specifically miss the feeling of getting to know new people better, which I haven’t done in a long while. Like I have a good number of core friends and it’s always nice when I see them, but on a few occasions in the past year or two I’ve spent some time with a person or people I don’t know (or know more shallowly) and am getting on well with; and just had the experience of feeling like I’m getting to know them more, getting deeper in and closer to something that could lead to a friendship. And have just really enjoyed that as a specific different good thing to spending time with existing friends. And this weekend did that for me, which was nice!

A weekend away is sort of an odd middle length of time for meeting new people. It’s long enough to actually get to know people a bit, unlike just a dinner or something; and the length also means there’s more likely to be space for organically interacting in different smaller groups or pairs. But it’s also short enough that it’s usually only just by fairly near the end that I do feel I’m getting to know a few new people well enough to be seriously enjoying interacting with them; so you kind of end up leaving just when staying would be the best.

I do, though, have opportunties coming up for more seeking socialising. As I rewrite this paragraph now, just before posting, and five months after the weekend, I left my job two months ago and am about to start a new one. Partly that itself means meeting new people, plus rather than going to London once a week as I did for my old job, I’ll be going to the much closer Oxford (35min train) 3 days a week, where there’s plenty of opportunity to find activities to go to, groups to join and so on. In the last couple of months I’ve also had some time off and did a fair bit of travelling around (very little in the UK though, so not to be posted about on here) including some visiting and reconnecting with people. So that’s nice!

Travelling home

The next morning, Climbing Programmer was feeling a little ill – actual illness, not being hung over – so we left as soon as we’d breakfasted; I driving his car back to Edinburgh containing us two, Cabbage, and one other from the group who lived in Edinburgh and needed to get there. Cabbage is expecting a baby in the late summer, and the person we were giving a lift to is father to a two-year-old, so Cabbage was able to get some welcome parenting advice!

Cabbage and I realised we would’ve got to the airport some three and a half hours before our flight, so we instead got out of the car at Haymarket in the city centre and sat around in a café for an hour before getting the bus out to the airport for our 3pm flight to London Stansted. At the other end, Cabbage kindly gave me a lift to Forest Gate station on the Elizabeth Line, close to his home, so I was able to get that single train to Paddington, to there change onto my train home to Moreton-in-Marsh. A long day’s journey, but all went smoothly.

[1] We ended up talking for a fair while about linguistics, which of course I always enjoy. We were talking about phonetics and phonology for a while, which is solid ground for me, but after that I ended up having to try get out my half-remembered knowledge of the hierarchy of subfields of linguistics, going phonetics → phonology → morphology → syntax → (maybe I’m forgetting something here) → pragmatics, increasing in terms of how large-scale a level of structure or abstraction it focusses on. I knew I’d heard some really fun examples of pragmatics distinctions – pragmatics being the most abstract field in that hierarchy, focussing on how context affects meanings – but couldn’t bring any to mind, and then ended up having to look some up on the internet while CP went out to buy snacks. I didn’t find any great ones, but the one I did run across was how, if a passenger in a car says “it’s hot in here”, that definitely does not just mean “it’s hot in here”, but rather means “can we make it cooler”. It’s not just an optional nice thing for the driver to then turn the air con up: if the driver just replied “mmm, yeah it is a bit” and did nothing, that’s them actually misunderstanding the statement. The only correct answers are to make it cooler, or say they’d rather not or something like that.

Incidentally, something I’ve never been sure of: with air conditioning, does to “turn the air con up” mean to set the temperature higher, or lower?

[3] An odd experience, that, meeting people again after nine years whom I had spent a weekend with. I feel like most of the time if I meet someone after many years, I either used to know them really well, or they were the most fleeting of acquaintances of the “I was once introduced to you” variety. Whereas with these people I could remember some substantial things we did together, some shared jokes that had happened back then and the like; but also I did barely know them. An unfamiliar feeling.

[4] One word that was mentioned was quine, meaning girl. Hearing that, my first thought was that that sounds like a nice Norse loanword, with Scandinavian languages having the kona/kvinne kind of word as their main word for woman, cognate with the English queen. And, thought I, the east of Scotland would probably be the most heavily Norse-influenced part. But let that be a cautionary tale: it’s not a Norse loanword; it’s just a descendant of the same Old English word that gave queen. And thinking about, I can see several problems with my guess (though I’m not highly confident about these either): I’m pretty confident the Germanic w had already become v in Viking-Age Old Norse, so if they’d borrowed this word it’d’ve already had the v, and so would have had to change to w somehow; whereas Old English already had the w. (Notably, English and Scots preserve the Germanic w while all the other Germanic languages have turned it to v – there aren’t many features where English/Scots are the most conservative Germanic languages!) I think the v in Danish/Norwegian kvinne is specifically from the old genitive plural kvenna, due to a loss of v before o everywhere. While it’s possible the same thing would happen in a borrowing (or that the loss of v in the other forms happened late enough that this borrowing was before it, I don’t know), that feels like it adds some probability mass against. And if I’d thought about it, I’d have realised that it’s actually not at all clear that there was more Norse influence in the East; in fact I think maybe the opposite is true (not sure). Norse influence is in the north-east in England, but in Scotland you had the whole Norse-Gaelic Kingdom of the Isles in the West and there are really transparent Norse-derived Gaelic placenames all over the western Highlands and the Islands, but my vague sense is that it’s less so in the east.

It also took me a long while to find that word on the internet, because I did not at all consider the qu– spelling for some reason – I kept trying to search for cwine, then found the right spelling only by looking at some Aberdeen newspaper article about “top 10 Doric words” or some such and seeing it in there!

I see that Aberdeen Uni has a computer science undergrad degree. I wonder how many times students in that have had the opprtunity to make some extremely niche joke about quine and quine…