Buchan+Bain in 2025

Eccles is my home for the moment. It is a lovely small hamlet, ie no shops, in the borders. My hosts Helen and Alan have been wonderful, and their two greyhounds have accepted me. We go for evening walks. There are perhaps 60-70 people here. This place existed in the 11th century when a Cistercian nunnery existed, although there are no ruins at all. 1774 church and much older cemetery. Yes it is heaven. Bluey and A Most of my time has been spent in a Scotlands People Centre where I can research all day long for a small fee. I am working my way through the 2000 odd Buchan descendants, esp death information. Slightly morbid, but my interest is professional. Me at Hawick Heritage hub yesterday. It is an archive and you can’t use your camera on the records. But fine to get an image for posterity. In Hawick I had several people smiling at me on the streets, and even chatting at the bus stop. That didn’t happen in Edinburgh. There were only three people in there all day, although a film fest...

Today we visited Clava Cairns, one of Scotland’s most evocative bronze age complexes, where we explored the burial cairns, cemetery passages, and standing stones, which date back over 4,000 years. From their website: Clava Cairns or the Prehistoric Burial Cairns of Bulnuaran of Clava are a group of three Bronze Age cairns located near Inverness. A hugely significant and exceptionally well preserved prehistoric site, Clava Cairns is a fantastic example of the distant history of Highland Scotland, dating back about 4,000 years. The cemetery was used in two periods. At around 2000 BC a row of large cairns was built, three of which can still be seen today. A thousand years later the cemetery was reused and new burials were placed in some of the existing cairns and three smaller monuments were built including a 'kerb cairn'. Traces of a smaller cemetery can also be seen at Milton of Clava, a short distance up the valley to the west. The cairns at Balnuaran of Clava extended along a ...

My 2025 visit to Scotland will be both a comfortable holiday and a research trip. It starts while staying with Helen for several weeks, takes a detour briefly to Inverness for a one-person private tour of my Bain ancestral lands, settles into an 18-day historian-led of Central Scotland, the Western Isles, the Highlands and Edinburgh, and finally ends with a visit to the Isle of Wight [I hope]. While with Helen I will do all the research on the Buchans in Midlothian, both on the ground and in the archives. And also get better prepared for the private tour of Inverness by doing more research on the Bains of Ross-shire, [including the MacBain Clan Tour]. My tour is with Academy Travel, a company based in Sydney. There are nine of us, an historian and a helper. I hope it will be relaxing, educational, fun and just plain mind-blowing [re scenery]. As new things happen on this visit, I'll add a new post. You'll find them under pages according to geographical regions: Edinburgh [inclu...