Dornoch

When you get to Inverness you think you're quite far north. There can't be that much more above it, right? Then someone tells you you've got another hour on a train before you get to your hotel...

As it turns out, the train doesn't go to Dornoch. The closest is Tain where, apparently, there are taxis which will take you the ten minute journey over this bridge to the hotel...

What certain hotel websites fail to mention though is that Tain only has 3 taxis; one on whom doesn't work Mondays, the other will be on holiday when you arrive, and it'll be 2 hours before the final one will be able to pick you up. After spending a ridiculous amount of time on a train, this is not news you really want to hear. Luckily the bridge was damn impressive.

These bridges cross a little stream allowing people to get from their houses to the outside world (well, the one on the left does, the other is big enough for a bus and not many people have buses pull into the drives of their houses). If I ever win the lottery and therefore have anywhere near enough money to buy a house, I'm going to make sure it has a little bridge across a moat too.

To be honest, there isn't a lot of do in Dornoch except play golf where they have these cool little bridges. Sadly I don't play golf so it was fortunate our holiday was only for 3 nights and there was a toyshop selling Transformers near the hotel.

One day we went for a walk down the beach. It was very nice, even though an American couple decided to turn it into a race and overtook us. On the way back we decided to take a shortcut and came across the following problem...

Stream to the left of them, stream to the right of them... Where was the bloody bridge? Home was straight across and despite my assurances that that it wasn't too wide, Emma assured me there was no change in hell I'd ever be able to jump it. Left led to rather a large river and I didn't fancy a swim. Right resulted in quite a long detour until a point was reached where the stream narrowed, but there wasn't much choice. Dornoch: get more bridges!

- Damian, May 2010

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