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Day 19 This cottage belonged to a famous writer

Cairngorms

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Robert Louis Stevenson here we come

Now I wish I could say that the lovely little cottage above is ours for our stay in Braemar in the Cairngorms. I had been looking forward to staying in the cottage where Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasue Island. The cottage still exist, it is in Braemar. We did stay there.

However……

Two parts of the cottage are rented out; the actual cottage itself, and what I think must once have been the servant’s quarters, or the kitchen maybe . That last part is where we were. There was a garden that we could look at, through the kitchen window. There was not that much to be seen from the sitting room window, just the fence and two large dustbins on the gravel outside the front door. This is the area that is described as: “Outside there is a charming little gravelled garden area (with furniture). The part we stayed in was at the back of the house in a side lane, so it was quite dark inside. We were greeted by instructions on the table about what to do when the water supply did not work, and how much to pay extra when we had used to amount of wood and electricity allotted to us. The first morning the fire alarm went off, and when you flushed the loo the whole house shook and a spund emitted from the pipes as if someone was drilling a whole with a pneumatic drill, and I mean e-ve-ry time the toilet was flushed!  It did not quite have the romantic feel that I had led myself to expect. So, Treasure Island turned out to be a nice piece of fiction after all. Maybe we were just spoiled rotten by our previous abodes, where everything was so tip top in order, and better than expected.  Because, in all fairness,  there was a huge fire place, hence my idea that this must have been the kitchen, and I did have a lovely fire one morning.  But oh the scenery, the scenery of the Cairngorms, now that is something worth talking about.

After all the hullabaloo with plumbing and fire alarms going off, I heard yet another quite persistent sound. It seemed to come from outside, and there it was: a quintessentially Scottish pipe band playing just round the corner of our cottage. Pipes yet again! These, however, did brighten the athmosphere considerably.

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The nice thing about spending time in a slightly larger place is that we spent the rest of the afternoon, (with tea and cake) in the Bothy bistro just down the road, reading our books and enjoying the surroundings.

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