the Brock of Carloway

In any case, after the stones were through, we took a sojourn into a town called Carlo way (a name I got quite a kick out of). We went to find the Brock of Carloway, a crumbled Pictish fortress and dwelling overlooking quite a view of the land.

Essentially, the fortress used to be a cylinder followed by a large space followed by another tall cylinder (the fortress height was about as tall as 7 or 8 men by my estimate.

In between the two layers were several levels of stone, so that there were roughly 5 or so floors to it, or at least there had been in days long past. The levels looked pretty intact still, but they were off limits now, and frankly I wasn’t going to test their sturdiness. The Picts must have either been really short or had lots of back problems, because all the entrance-ways were a little more than half my height. They were cool playground ruins though.

We went late back to our bed and breakfast following all this, for to picnic on the meat pies and varied baked snacks we had bought earlier from the bakery. The informal picnic feel was a nice change after eating out as often as we had been, and the meat pastries were all pretty good.

With dinner we all split two beers we had bought. The first was McEwan’s Championship. It was thick, dark, and very very tasty. It was gone quite swiftly, and I shall look for it in the future when I’m back in the US. The second was a dark beer called Hobgoblin. We got it because it was called Hobgoblin. It was drinkable for certain, but definitely not thrilling.