Things you can do at Highland League games...

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

This morning I got breakfast from our host, Agnes.  A nice Scottish breakfast.

Our first stop of the day was Culloden Battlefield.  Culloden was the final battle of the Jacobite Rising, effectively ending Prince Charlie's real attempts to gain control of the crown and get rid of the Hanoverians and restore the House of Stuart to the crown.  About 1,500 highlanders were slaughtered at the battle.  The British left the dead on the field and when the Jacobite forces had retreated, the walked through the field and killed the wounded.  Afterwards, the British spent a lot of their time repressing Gaelic culture and persecuting the remaining Jacobite supporters, they made speaking Gaelic, playing the pipes and wearing kilts illegal.

The field was interesting and I imagine that the vast majority of the stuff inside the museum was as well but a certain little boy made it difficult for us to actually stay and read and pay attention - though, he did get to hold the man dressed as a Jacobite's sword.

He poops at famous battlefields too.

Next up we hit Clava Cairns and ate some lunch there after finding a geocache.  The site is a number of  prehistoric burial cairns that are about 4,000 years old.  The entrances to them were carefully lined up with the winter (I think) solstice.  The burial mounds are surrounded by a circle of standing stones.  It was pretty cool to see.  We did some silly picture with all of us standing on rocks - but after like 8 takes, we couldn't get exactly what we were after.

I had his highness on one of the tall stones, but he didn't like that.

When we were done standing on some really old graves, who's history unfortunately we will never know, we headed to Cawdor Castle which we subsequently decided to skip because the baby was napping.

We then shot over to Ft. George, which the king set up as the headquarters from where he could send out redcoats to oppress the highlanders.  Now, it's the HQ for her majesty's own Highlander Regiments.  The set up reminded me very much of the fort that we say during our trip to Puerto Rico last summer.

There were some cool artifacts there - one of which I have become obsessed with and will probably buy - at least one version of, is a map of Scotland that designated the lands owned by the clans.

His Highness wandered in to one of the shops at the fort and started to talk and play with the man who was working there.  Then, a woman came in to the shop and started playing with him too - she was the head curator for the museum there and that didn't stop her from getting on the floor, pulling the footballs  that they had for sale off the shelf and heading and throwing balls to him.  This went on for at least 15 minutes while we all bullshitted.  It was quite funny.  He was dribbling all over the shop - I thought maybe this was her secret plan to get him to run in to a shelf of shitty coffee mugs but it wasn't.  They all had a good time.

After the fort we headed to the mall.  Yes, the mall but it was for the Celtic, FC store that was there.  I wanted to pick up a sweatshirt.  Jess wanted to go to Sports Direct because they always advertise good deals during the Premier League games.   She got some kind of running short things and I was able to score last year's Liverpool kit and t-shirt for his highness.  We headed over to dinner at the Mustard Seed.  Of course, you know who, charmed the pants off the Polish hostess.  She brought him two cars, and a house to play with - she also came over to play with him repeatedly.  I had some highland venison.  Jess, another bean cassoulet and his highness - pasta.

When the dinner was over we dropped off some stuff at The Cottage and headed to the Clachnachuddin FC v Inverness Caledonian Thistle.  Caledonian plays in the Scottish Premier League and Clach in the Highland League - both teams are in Inverness, so we got to see a little pre-season derby.  Of course, we missed kick off which is apparently our MO for games when we are here.  I was super happy to get to go - I will always go if given the opportunity, I don't care who is playing.  The only person who was more excited was His Highness who yelled "ooooooo" and "goal" even though no one had scored.  He was completely enthralled for the first 20 minutes that we were there.

The grounds were like the kind you see when a low level team plays in the FA Cup - there were houses right behind it - which I am sure get regularly pelted with balls, there was one sitting area and an area where spectators can stand.  It was very homey and you can tell that most of the people knew each other.

I learned quite a few things at the game this evening.

Things you can do at Highland League games:

• smoke
• bring your dog
• throw your toy car on the pitch
• get another kid to run out and get it for you 
• come late and pay for one ticket when you need two
• pay an extra pound to get a seat in the stands
• the team store is limited; sizes in the shirt you want are even more limited
• my son pays more attention than I think he does when I am watching football.  I'm surprised he didn't yell, "shit", "that's bullshit" or "what the hell are you doing!!!"