Taking the Low Road

Skip the glitzy tour books.

Almost every great house and castle worth its salt has compiled a rather impressive, glossy, full-color booklet for which they charge the equivalent of a U.S. hardback book. While you’re there, under the spell of that magical place, it’s hard to resist the temptation to buy one of these marketing marvels. “After all,” you reason, “it’ll help us get so much more from the experience.”

Maybe. If the glossy book is about your clan castle or has anything to do with your Scottish or Celtic heritage, buy it. In fact, buy everything you can get your hands on in that gift shop. It’ll easily fit into your luggage because you, smart traveler that you are, aren’t buying a bunch of tchotchkes to lug home. You may have a very hard time finding such site-specific information elsewhere (even on the Net) and if you do, you may have to pay dearly for someone else’s incurred expense of shipping it across the pond and paying duties.

But if you have no personal connection to the site, I advise skipping the glitzy booklet. If you’ve done much research before you left home or you’ve accessed the Net each night before the next day’s touring, you may already know the bulk of what that glossy bit of fluff has to say. If your trip is very lengthy, you may (as we often do) find you can barely absorb the facts related by the tour guides and the information paddles in each room. Any information beyond that is overload.

Here’s our rule-of-thumb. We gladly accept any free maps, flyers, and handouts and use these as we tour the site. We scan the pricey, glossy booklets after the tour, looking for anything that wasn’t covered in the tour or free handouts, or that we don’t remember reading online. We ask ourselves, “Will we need to know this bit of arcane information?” Sometimes our answer is “yes” because of what we do – paint and sell Scottish artwork online and supply viewers with pertinent history and background about it. If you’re not in the same (or a related) business, you need to know way less than we do. If we skip these expensive books most of the time, you definitely should.

Long before we ever began traveling abroad, some well-traveled friends were taking us on an informal travelogue of their recent trip to the U.K. By the stack on the dining table, it appeared they’d bought every booklet available at every place they’d visited. I asked them a question about something in one of the books. They didn’t know. “Oh, we never read it.” “Not even when you were there?” I asked. “Nope. No time,” was the response. “How about when you arrived home?” “Nope. Trip was over, and we forgot all about it.”

Lesson learned – and for once – not the hard way! Skip the fancy-dancy guidebooks.