Chris De Burgh The Road To Freedom
Sandra Grady
An old fellow in a little wooden booth took our 4 pounds for parking, and we strolled up the lane. It was cold, but the morning rain had given way to sunshine, and my wife had a grin on her face. I coaxed her into recreating a few images from the show's promotional photos.
During our recent trip to Scotland, our favorite excursions were when we went searching for sites where the "Outlander" TV series films. We spent a day in Falkland, which doubled for 1940s-era Inverness in the first season of the show; tromped around the Royal Burgh of Culross, used as a 1750s-era village in the show, and questioned the garden keepers about the Catshead apples; laughed with a guide at Blackness Castle when he shared tales of the production using his jobsite for various prison scenes.
We spent a day on the shores of Loch Ness and in the ruins of Urquhart Castle, though we never saw Nessie. We drove through the Highlands on narrow country roads over precipitous drops, and only once had a near-collision for being on the incorrect side of the road. We explored Inverness and Glasgow, visited fairy tale castles, towers rising above green cow pastures, and somber battlefields. We chased signs for a witches' hill, and pulled off the road to photograph standing stones, ruins, abbeys and grave markers.
In Glasgow, we were denied entry to the cathedral because a film crew was taking down its gear; the day before, Chris Pine and a hundred extras had ridden up to the cathedral on horseback, filming scenes for a movie about Robert the Bruce. We went to the nearby St. Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art instead, bought steak pies from a bakery, and strolled the hilltop necropolis from which the merchants who built the city still look down on what they wrought.
We learned a lot, both about history and our place in it, often marveling at the myriad of ways our American life was so different from that of our Scottish counterparts. We watched as the horrific Las Vegas shooting unfolded on the evening news, and listened as UK anchors and reporters tried to make sense of America's gun control/Second Amendment freedoms debate.
It struck me one day that Culloden was, for some Scots, what the Civil War is for some Southerners. That was when an old fellow in a visitors' center warned me not to take much stock in a nearby museum because they covered up how one of the local clans had helped the British round up Jacobites. He was still mad about that. I started to tell him about words scratched through on a marker at Culloden, then realized he would have agreed with whoever defaced the marker, as it had mentioned some of the Jacobites were shot in the back as they ran from the field.
Glasgow has six of the 14 surviving Police Boxes once ubiquitous in UK cities; most have been painted blue to look like the one on "Doctor Who," and they house little kiosks selling coffee and baked goods. I think the Doctor would approve.
64591212e2