Adventuring with MaryLou: 5-17-2025 Scotland’s Wild Tour

5-17-2025 Scotland’s Wild Tour—Standing Stones

This tour was a very small group tour. There were only 5 of us and we were all American women. The destination was the Standing Stones. It was an all day tour by way of some very narrow back roads with stupendous scenery. Truly stupendous. Our driver-guide was James. Here are some highlights….

Just outside of Glasgow was Dumbarton and Dumbarton Castle, which is a new castle—from the 1800s. This area is where my ancestors lived around 1300. The name Dumbarton can be divided into Dum (or Dun) = Fort, and Barton = Britain, so it’s the fort of the Britons, or English. Remember that Scotland has been taken over and taken back by England over the centuries. In fact, there is a movement afoot to do it again—Scotland wants its independence. The most noted feature of Dumbarton is the castle which is built on a Volcanic plug of rock. I didn’t get a good photo of it but Teresa did so take a look.

Moving onward…we stopped at a cute little village called Luss, along the shores of Loch Lamond. I saw two interesting things. 1) People swimming in the lake. It was 50 degrees outside. The lake must have been much much colder. But the sun was shining and the weather was unusually warm. Here’s a pic…

The second thing was the up-cycling of old phone booths. There were real phones inside—but I don’t know if they worked. “Phone” was replaced with “Internet.”

Of course, the village itself was charming.

Our next stop was Inverary Castle. I’ve seen lots of castles and this one was definitely not worth the price of admission. There was an impressive weapons room, though. There were muskrats fanned out on the walls. Some of them even killed American colonists back in the day. The gardens were nice. I walked around with one of the other women from the tour. Our conversation was more interesting than Inverary Castle.

We briefly drove through the village of Tarbet which is at the northern end of Loch Lamond. Several decades ago when I went to the University of Kansas, I had a roommate named Shari Tarbet. So the name of this town held my interest. It seems that the name means “carry over” and it’s the place where the Vikings carried their ships over about 1½ miles of land from what is now Loch Long to Loch Lamond. Then they were able to invade along the shores of the lake. In truth, the Scots fought them off so the Vikings weren’t very successful. After all, they were highland Scots.

We finally reached the Standing Stones of Kilmartin Glen. I learned several things. The stones that are left standing are lined up with the moon. Every 18 years, one can look through a notch on the major stone and it will line up with the moon in some way. Interesting. I tried pushing on the stone to check out the vibe but nothing happened. I didn’t even go back in time.

We walked around the area and learned about the burial cairns. These are marked by large circles of rocks with a larger stone in the middle. They are burial mounds. I was impressed with the sheer number of stones that had to be gathered and moved.

And moving on…we went to Loch Awe. It was….wait for it…..awesome.

Back toward Glasgow, we stopped at Kilchurn Castle, or Caisteal Chaol a Chuirn. This is a ruin in a field and a bit interesting to explore. It was such a lovely sunny day to be outside on a walk.