Living Like Queens

Dingwall and Beauly, Scotland

When we decided to go to Scotland, we knew that we wanted to stay at least one night in a castle. Scotland is full of castle hotels, but there was only one that was in our price range, available, and along our route, so we booked one night at The Tulloch Castle Hotel in Dingwall. This morning, we took our time getting ready in Burghead and then drove about two hours to Dingwall. It was, like all Scottish drives, stunning. We saw gorgeous scenery with sheep and cows and horses on the side of the road. We’re not sure that our GPS always takes us the most practical way (did we really need to take all of those one-track roads?) but it definitely always takes us a beautiful way. It is a little exhausting to be switching hotels every night (or every other night), so we decided to take it pretty easy today. We arrived early at Tulloch and we weren’t able to check in yet, so we asked the receptionist for suggestions of what to do in the area. We weren’t keen on any of them really, so we decided to find a park and have a little picnic. I pulled up what I thought was a park on my phone and decided to have google maps take us there. We’re still not sure if we got the wrong directions or if the “park” was just some woods behind somebody’s house, but we ended up on a very rocky one-track gravel road that is very likely only used by a tractor and well, we’re lucky that all our tires are still intact! Was google maps playing a trick on us? We know that the car’s GPS is much more accurate than Google Maps around here, but we couldn’t find the park in the GPS’s search engine (which should have been a sign.) Kim got a pretty interesting day of driving in while she tried to navigate these roads and not totally ruin the rental. Since that didn’t work out, when we finally got back to a normal road after stopping to look at some cute sheep, we followed the signs to Beauly and walked around.

In Beauly, we bought lunch food at a local co-op and waked down to a park and had a picnic. I have to say, brining a towel along was one of the best things I’ve done. I haven’t needed to use it as an actual towel, but my Turkish towel has been a great picnic blanket. We’ve already used it quite a few times. When we were finished with lunch we walked back into town and looked at a cute little shop which had gorgeous clothes and shoes and jewelry and home goods that we could not buy (backpacking dillema!) We also got to look at the Beauly Priory (or what’s left of it anyway) which was very cool and unexpected. This trip has been mostly about nature, so it was good to get a little history into it as well. After the priory, it was time to check in, so we checked into our castle room which was very cute and spent the next couple of hours working on the blog and getting things sorted out at The Green Lady Bar inside of the hotel. Before we knew it, it was time for dinner inside the hotel. Dinner at the hotel restaurant was good, it has a beautiful dining room which is decorated like a castle should be but with a modern flair. We tried haggis for the first time in the form of haggis bon-bons. Surprisingly enough Kim who is much pickier about meat liked it better than Annette did. Unfortunately we aren’t haggis or black pudding people, so it seems that our tastes are not Scottish at least where food is concerned, where nature is concerned, well that’s another story. The dinner was lovely, the dessert was AMAZING.

We gathered in the bar at 9:00 (or as we need to get used to, 21:00) for the Tulloch Castle ghost tour! The tour proved to be as much history as it was supernatural which added some learning to the fun. The castle was built as a fort in the 1400s by Vikings. We were shown to a room with original walls and ceilings that they affectionately named the dungeon. After playful comments about how naughty children get sent to this room, we found out a bit about that history. What is not original in that room is the floor. It turns out the building was once much larger than it currently appears as it was built far into the ground. The original floor would have been 50 feet down. There are networks of tunnels created by the Vikings that are unfortunately lost to time. Moving to the entry way, our guide pulled up a rug and pushed a piece of plywood out of the way to give us a peek at the remnants of what was. I don’t know how far that surviving tunnel reaches, but it was farther down and out than I could see.
As we moved from room to room, we learned more about hauntings and history. The fort was repurposed into a grand house and was owned by a couple different clans. It was used as a hospital in WWII and as boarding for a boarding school for about thirty years, ending in the 1980s.
There were various tales, but a favorite is the namesake for the bar in the castle, the Green Lady. Lore tells us that the patriarch of one of the clans who owned Tulloch Castle had quite the wandering eye. One day, a pre-teen daughter of the family went to look for her parents in their bed chamber and walked in on her father in a compromising position with a servant. She turned and ran down the stairs to alert her mother. One way or another, she didn’t make it to the bottom of the stairs alive and died of a broken neck. It is said that the “Green Lady,” still haunts Tulloch Castle.
After other antidotes, the guide went into detail about hauntings in specific rooms - many of which those attending the tour were staying in! He focused in on one couple staying in one of the most haunted rooms! It got pretty intense, and the couple was the focus of the rest of the stories. They were quite good sports, but when the tour ended, I did hear one of them say to the other, “let’s go to to car.” ~Annette & Kim

This was the key to our room!