Back in September of 2017 I went on a roadtrip through the gorgeous Northern Highlands of Scotland: remote areas and little villages with only 1 pub and a 10 room hotel - it's quite the romantic thing to do and my boyfriend and I jokingly called this our 'pre-Brexit roadtrip' - we love the UK and just used it as an excuse to go for a whole month to this gorgeous place on earth.

Scots are friendly and chatty, their food is comforting (although no haute cuisine), and the landscapes are simply gorgeous: rain and sunshine follow each other so quickly you can get quite dramatic shots on the same viewpoint just by staying there for an hour - yes, indeed, as a photographer you rarely get disappointed by plain boring blue skies that make for sucky travel shots.

I love them dramatic and gloomy.

First content on Steem: Scottish travel posts

Anyway, in December of 2017 I got on Steem and having no idea where I had landed and what I actually wanted to write about (I just wanted to write and be part of a community again like I had in my teenage years) I grabbed the first content I could think of and started posting: my travels through Scotland, mainly through the then 'hip and new' app Steepshot.

Short posts with a one paragraph description. They quickly started earning a shocking 50$ and 80$ as the price of STEEM was crazy back then and darling @kpine picked up my efforts. How grateful I was and still am for his early support on my posts - I never felt like my content was really seen, just upvoted with high value. I was super social and commeting a lot as I knew how 'community blogging' worked already, and many Plankton and Minnows have seen and commented my posts. But the people I interact with today - they never have seen some of my more interesting photography or cooler travel stories.

Which is why today I decided to start joining in 'Showcase Sunday' initiated by @nonameslefttouse - who currently seems to be on a Steem break, but he assured me earlier this year that was normal for him and I shouldn't be worried if it happened again. So I won't, and instead just keep his Steem spirit alive by continuing his efforts.

Scottish castles: ghosts and the imagination

Castles in Scotland all have this air surrounding them of having lived through many generations of families and their stories - and of heroic battles survived. It's not strange to read on a descriptive sign near the castle of a female ghost still moving over the castle grounds so she can kill off some family member that hurt her in the past. It fits the Scottish talent for telling stories and it certainly adds some charm to visiting a place like that - almost never big tourist attractions, just a leftover stack of stones and me doing a lot of research on where to find them - signs won't lead you to these places.

Two other people were here - two man, which was brave, as indeed this castle was supposed to still house the ghost of a woman needing revenge on one of her male family members...

A damn glorious sight, way way way off-road, but adding tons of stories to the imagination as there was so much wind and the sounds of the sea and seagulls - totally making you feel like centuries past where the world sounded exactly like that - no cars, not even from a distance, just your breath, the wind, the birds.

A little more well-known Castle near Skye, and thanks to all the visitors we skipped going in - I like my castles remote and unvisited, and not turned into museums. From afar still giving me an opportunity for gorgeous images though - autumn kicking in helped adding some colour to the overall grey shots.

Photos collected from the following old posts:

• [PHOTO] A Scottish Castle #1
• [PHOTO] A Scottish Castle #2
• [PHOTO] A Scottish castle #3
• Eilean Donan Castle, Scotland
• Three layers of seeing: from outside to inside, an example

_{Showcase Sunday is an initiative by @nonameslefttouse - where we use Sunday to showcase some old work. Not just a plain copy and paste though, but for example brush up an old post with some new information or make a compilation post from several posts that have a similar idea/theme and re-edit some of the paragraphs. I decided to show some of my older work - even though I got upvoted very generously from the beginning by one whale, I never felt like my posts had 'many eyes' as people didn't know me yet.}