I stopped at a little village called Birnam which is on the Highland Boundary fault, and since I was tired I parked my Fig by a little copse of trees and put my tent up in the woodland. I spent the night there and golly they have a lot of owls. Soon after darkness had fallen the owls started hooting to the extent that I found them somewhat unnerving. I also found a plentiful supply of, what I supposed to be, fly agaric toadstools, whose red and white colours can be found on the traditional costume of Father Christmas. Indeed, the whole legend of Father Christmas and his reindeer is thought to come from the hallucinogic properties of this toadstool. Identifying toadstools is notoriously difficult, and I am no expert, so I can't really say for definite what they are.

Some red toadstools; are they fly agaric?

Birnam has a very smart, modern community centre called an "Arts Centre" or "Institute". It came as no surprise that this opulent new building was funded by the National Lottery, in 2001. There is an auditorium here seating 200 people, and it seems that every week or so there's a performance of some kind, be it theatre, comedy or music. When I was here the Forestry Commission was using it for a conference, doubtless an opportunity to have a day indoors and have free tea. Furthermore, there is a rather good collection of weekend workshops and evening classes: silver-smithing, upholstery, french & spanish, book-binding, ceramics, halloween lanterns. I think it's important for any community to have adult-education classes, and back home my local council advertises a huge plethora of them. Advertising is not the same as actually running them, however, and invariably whenever I sign up for one, I have a long wait and then I am told that the class has been cancelled. Thus there are effectively few adult-education classes, but the council still manages to take the credit for running lots. Is this fraud?

I can't help but think the National Lottery being discriminatory: I know the community at Findhorn paid for its own auditorium at great expense. Who decides where these handouts go and who gets them? Since fraud is one of the themes of this book, I shall notify the reader that the Institute was advertising an "IT centre" here, which is I expect one of the arguments they used to gain Lottery handouts, however when I tried to find it I was told that it had "closed down" ie there isn't one at all!

At Birnam there is a Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) exhibition, which is a little tenuous since she was English and lived in the Lake District most of her life. However there was train station at Birnam, and she would have passed through it for her family summer holidays when she was young. Her father was Rupert Potter, an affluent barrister who lived in London. From 1871 to 1881 when Beatrix was fifteen, the family rented Dalguise House, an elegant mansion overlooking the Tay close to Dunkeld, over the river, and it seems that Beatrix loved it.

Around the middle of the nineteenth century it became common for affluent Londoners to spend the summer in Scotland. The novels of Walter Scott (which appeared approx 1815-1830) had made the Highlands rather fashionable. It was an opportunity to escape the horrible industrial cities choked with smoke, dirt and poverty, and enjoy some clean air, clean water and rural persuits such as walking, fishing, shooting, deer-stalking, riding and the newly popular golf. Furthermore, Prince Albert purchased Balmoral Castle in 1852 for use as a summer residence of the royal family, and set about extending it. If royalty were doing it, it must be good. A branch-line to Birnam was opened in 1856 which connected with the Perth-Stirling-Edinburgh route, and it is conceivable that passengers to Balmoral left the train at Birnam and continued the next fifty miles north by carriage.

Beatrix was more of an artist than an author, and she loved to draw. She wrote in her journal "I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result" (1884). She also had an interest in the natural world and had a menagerie of pets in her childhood. Living near London's Natural History Museum she visited to study cases of insect samples. She took an interest in mycology, the study of fungi, and I can tell you myself that there are a lot of fungi in the forests of this area. One of her papers on this subject was presented to The Linnean Society of London in 1897, but it was ignored. So I suspect she quit on the scientific career, and the scientific establishment probably didn't want women involved anyway. In 1997, the Society issued a posthumous official apology to Potter for the way she had been treated by them.

Her first published work, "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" began life as a letter from Dunkeld to a five-year old aquaintance, Noel Moore, dated September 4th 1893. This she revised and expanded, and published herself in a small print-run in 1901. A year later an established publisher F.Warne & Co. decided to run an edition and thus she became an established children's author.

That, then is a potted history of the tale of Beatrix Potter. The exhibition here caters for 4-8 year olds, as there are tiny chairs, pencils and scribbling-desks and so forth. I imagine it's a bloody nightmare when it's full of screaming brats. Whilst I have no objection to the children having fun, I think it's a grand folly to mix the children's area with the adult.

Birnam has more of interest than the Beatrix Potter exhibition however. The cathedral was, like many, ransacked in 1560 during the Reformation. I am coming to realize that seeing ruins instead of cathedrals is quite normal for Scotland, and here in Dunkeld there are some quite pretty ruins that seem to be a deliberate reminder to an era when the church was far too rich to be holy. The Scottish Privy council had declared "Take down and burn all images, altars and monuments of idolatry in Dunkeld Cathedral, but protect woodwork, windows, glass and ironwork." in an attempt to moderate the destruction. This had little effect, and almost everything was destroyed.

The bridge over the Tay here was designed by Thomas Telford, and is not one of his famous works. It was paid for by the fourth duke of Atholl on the understanding that he would impose a toll to recoup his capital. It was built 1804-1809 as part of a larger project to improve the Highland road scheme, by replacing two ferries. Seventy years after opening, the locals decided that the Duke's family had got their money back and they stormed the toll-houses on several occasions to demonstrate their discontent. They had their way, and the bridge was made public.

Telford's bridge over the Tay at Birnam

Dunkeld was also the scene of a skirmish between Jacobite and Cameronian forces in 1689, which brings us on to the whole subject of the Jacobite uprising. We'll look at it in more detail later, but essentially it was a conflict between Catholics and Protestants. In this skirmish a force of Cameronian men held Dunkeld, and a larger force of Jacobites arrived. To defend their position, the Cameronians ignited a cluster of homes and there was a general pandemonium. It seems this area had strong Jacobite loyalties, as it provided four regiments of men for the uprising of 1715.

Get this: the helpful people at the tourist information centre in Birnam gave me a leaflet about camping in Scotland, and you are allowed to camp just about anywhere, and it's called "wild camping". Now I'm a responsible traveller, so I would prefer to stay at a camp site if there is one. I visited the campsite at Inver, down the road a mile from Birnam, and they told me that their campsite was waterlogged, but they could put me into a vacant caravan berth for £10. Ten Quid! Ten Quid! hahaha! I could stay in the hostel in St Andrews for ten quid because it's not high season. The hostel there was in the middle of town, had a television, wifi, showers, heating a roof and a kitchen. What would I get from this campsite? a shower and a toilet, and I might have to pay extra for the shower! He must be flipping crazy to think that I'm going to pay ten quid when I am legally entitled to fling my tent down in any patch of woodland and camp wild! Ten quid! Is this flipping extortion?