{"id":573889887,"date":"2017-05-30T22:59:14","date_gmt":"2017-05-31T03:59:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/?p=573889887"},"modified":"2017-06-23T15:27:47","modified_gmt":"2017-06-23T20:27:47","slug":"whaligoe-haven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2017\/05\/30\/whaligoe-haven\/","title":{"rendered":"Whaligoe Haven"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Near Ulbster, a slightly-less-narrow spot on a diminutive two-lane Scottish road, you&#8217;ll find Whaligoe Haven. This is a beautiful little place you&#8217;re told to watch out for, but it doesn&#8217;t show up on the national maps and there is no signage. You park behind a hotel and walk through someone&#8217;s garden to get there. And then, there are the steps. <\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/may17\/may100.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/EznAuQGivNU?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>You go down to look up, and when you look up you are surrounded on three sides by 250-foot cliffs. <\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/may17\/may101.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/may17\/may102.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>It is a beautiful harbor, at the bottom is a manmade grassy area and the ruin of an ancient storage building that held salt used to cure fish. You&#8217;re standing just in front of what&#8217;s left of the stone walls from this view:<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/may17\/may103.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>So let&#8217;s talk about the name. A &#8220;goe&#8221; is a rocky inlet surrounded by cliffs. The prevailing opinion is that Whaligoe was named after a dead whale that was washed ashore here. <\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/may17\/may104.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>There are 334 flagstone Whaligoe Steps, and this dates back to at least 1769, but there&#8217;s no consensus on when they were built. The current design, however, dates back to 1792.<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/may17\/may105.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>More than 20 fishing boats used this harbor each summer during its most successful period in the 19th century. The last ship sailed away in the 1960s. <\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/may17\/may106.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>Whaligoe Haven is now maintained by volunteers.<\/p>\n<p>Tonight we&#8217;re in Kingussie, in the Cairngorms National Park, where we&#8217;ll spend two days. We walked through town today, had afternoon tea and saw a few gift shops. I liked the cover of this day planner:<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/may17\/may107.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>And of course I took pictures of this book to send to people. <\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/may17\/may108.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>It was a tongue-in-cheek sort of thing, but it made fun of men far more than women:<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/may17\/may109.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re staying in a 140-year-old Victorian home. After dinner in a pub downtown, we&#8217;re having tea and shortbread before we call it a night. Tomorrow, we go canyoneering!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Near Ulbster, a slightly-less-narrow spot on a diminutive two-lane Scottish road, you&#8217;ll find Whaligoe Haven. This is a beautiful little place you&#8217;re told to watch out for, but it doesn&#8217;t show up on the national maps and there is no signage. You park behind a hotel and walk through someone&#8217;s garden to get there. And [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,10,75,8,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-573889887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventures","category-photo","category-scotland","category-tuesday","category-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573889887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573889887"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573889887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573889895,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573889887\/revisions\/573889895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573889887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573889887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573889887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}