Sunday Times Where Was I? Holiday Competition

Near as I can figure it, through the possibly flawed perceptual filters of my own reality tunnel, the most likely answers this week, seem to me to be:


Q1. Forsinard Station


Q2. Dounreay Castle (aka Dounrae Castle)

The puzzle author has been a bit crafty this week as there are at least three railways (and probably more), called the S&CR. These are the Swindon & Cricklade Railway (built c 1881), the Shrewsbury & Chester Railway (built c 1845) and the Sutherland & Caithness Railway (built c 1874). The last one is the best fit for the given clues and seems to place us at Forsinard station, which is the visitors centre for the Flows National Nature Reserve (28,000 acres and established c 2007, according to some of the references I checked), in the Flow country, which appears to be a giant peat bog.

Travelling four miles or so west south west of Forsinard, would bring us to the hill fort on Ben Griam Beg, which is around five hundred and eighty metres or nineteen hundred and three feet high. The fort is described as the highest in Scotland, consisting of a roughly oval enceinte one hundred and fifty two metres by sixty one metres, on the Royal Commission on the Ancient Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) website and reminds the Eastender of a very bad French gag:

1st geezer: Ma femme est enceinte

2nd geezer: Ah bon, de combien de Watts?


Driving north along the A897, takes us to the estuary of the Halladale river and Melvich Bay. The lighthouse on a headland north west of that position, is probably Strathy point lighthouse which according to the Northern Lighthouse Board, was the first lighthouse built as an all electric station between 1953 and 1958. Its height is given as fourteen metres or around forty six feet.

Ten miles south east of Strathy point lie the ruins of Dounreay Castle (c 16th century) and the partially decommissioned nuclear power station of Dounreay (Dounreay Castle is also known as Dounrae Castle). It is just as well that the writer could not visit it because they seem to have spilled quite a bit of radioactive liquid there over the years. The power station seems to have been connected to the national grid c1962. The disused airfield there was once called HMS Tern (II) during the second world war, when it was passed from RAF coastal command (c 1944), to the admiralty.