Islands:
Portree, Skye

"Portree, capital of the Hebrides" - there's magic in the name, isn't there?! Gaelic Port Ruighe, of course, 'the Port of the Slopes'. Didn't they have a word for 'port' in the old Gaelic culture? Maybe they didn't have ports. The Estonian word for 'fork' is a fairly recent loan word...

I think we were probably a bit late arriving in Portree.

Something like twenty years too late.

I counted 50 bed-and-breakfast places within half-a-mile, and the Youth Hostel was full. The B&B we found was very cozy, run by people from the urban lowlands, who'd moved to Skye to start a reptilarium... The locals said 'What's a snake-house got to do with the Hebrides?', and they won a prize from the regional development council.

Ah - we did see one trace of an old tradition; it was in Safeways supermarket, where the checkouts were still functioning as the grocer's shops must have been doing for generations, the assistant putting everything on a counter and thoughtfully turning each item over as she added up the prices...

One nice thing about the B&B: the reptile lady came in at breakfast and said "Tere homikust" - 'good morning' - in Estonian so clear that even I understood it. Dagmar was listening keenly, fascinated at what she heard, and burst out: "Oh! is that Gaelic?". Fortunately snakes are deaf, and it seems snake-keepers are too, she didn't hear Dagmar enough to understand what had happened, and there was no harm done...