Elgin and Burghead (but mostly Burghead)

Hi all! This is a short blog update to balance the epic work (if I do say so myself!) that was my Inverness entry.

On Sunday morning we left Inverness via train for Elgin, a small city to the east, going with no idea what we’d find in the city proper. We wanted to throw our stuff down and hop on a bus for Burghead, a coastal village. We had a few addresses of small places to stay, but nothing seemed to be open and no place opened their doors when we knocked. It was snowing heavily and it was fairly cold and we were anxious to find a place, so we went back to one of the bed and breakfast establishments we saw when first walking into town. Elgin is a small town of about 25 thousand, but like Inverness it has a fairly robust mall for its size and it hardly feels like it’s missing much. The traditional distinction between city and town involves the presence of a cathedral, and Elgin has an old, destroyed or abandoned cathedral, so it’s technically a city. I’m not sure what happened to the cathedral; it’s possible that during the reformation it was deliberately dismantled. Either way, we didn’t spend a lot of time walking around Elgin and once we put our stuff down in our room we headed off to the bus station to go to Burghead.

Jarred had read online about a site called the Burghead Well, which is an old Pict well from the fifth century or so with no real known purpose. We took a bus into Burghead, right on the coast, and walked over to the seawall to take some pictures.

We had spent two and a half hours waiting in the dark on the side of the road in Corrimony the night before, and we were glad to be out of the cold that night, but nothing could prepare us for the cold that is the North Sea coast. Because oh my God. It was the bitterest chill imaginable. We stood around shivering, took pictures for probably three minutes, and ran away cursing Neptune for causing that kind of cold. We knew buses came to and from Elgin every hour, and we had originally expected to spend an hour or so walking around and tracking down the well, but the town was so small and the well was marked off well (haha!) so we decided to go see it and get the hell out of that God-forsaken town.

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The well itself was, despite the cold, pretty neat. It’s essentially in someone’s backyard, though it’s surrounded by a low stone wall, and to get in to see the well visitors have to ring the doorbell of a nearby house and ask for the key (“Open at every reasonable hour”). The key is apparently held safe by the residents of the house, and their job seems to be to give the key to visitors and have people sign the guestbook. We collected the key, walked down the alley and opened the gate and had a look at the well, which was essentially a giant hollowed-out cavern. It was pretty cool, and it was probably about what you would expect from the Picts: some rocks in a dome, with a giant hole in the middle. Predictable, but still neat!

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We wanted to get some food and catch the next bus back to Elgin, so we walked into the bar and had a pint of beer, but they didn’t have any food so we just watched the Celtic match on TV before leaving. Our number three goal on the trip was to not get beaten up in a Scottish bar, and the people in the Burghead bar were very friendly (and surprisingly easy to understand!) so we managed to get away without any problems. Mission accomplished! Check out the full set from our whole hour in Burghead here.

I was going to take photos of Elgin Cathedral, but we were so cold and our feet were so wet that I just decided to get some food in the mall and come back to the room and shower and sleep. Unfortunately our bed and breakfast didn’t have internet access so I couldn’t update my blog or check Facebook or anything, so we ended up sleeping a lot of the afternoon before going off to an Indian restaurant across the street inside a converted church.

Next on our itinerary was Aberdeen, where we spent two nights with one day in the tiny town of Cruden Bay, where Bram Stoker wrote and is said to have taken inspiration for his description of Transylvania. Check back for that update soon!