Ceilidh at Mar Lodge

We went to a ceilidh at the stag ballroom at Mar Lodge last night. The ballroom is slightly on the macabre side with over 2,000 red deer skulls lining the ceiling and walls, many of which were stalked by members of the royal family going back to the 18th century. The building is almost unchanged since the late 19th century and even has a unique Victorian ventilation system.

It’s a popular location for weddings as there’s a chapel on the estate and Mar Lodge itself has lots of accommodation. Here’s a photo of Mar Lodge.

This is the chapel in this next photo.

The ceilidh was great fun as ceilidhs always are. They’re a mix of people from all ages and backgrounds dancing together with a live band playing fiddle music. No one cares whether you know the steps or not or even whether you can dance. People go just to enjoy themselves. The band last night was the Drams and they were very good. I took a short video of it.

State schools in Scotland teach students ceilidh dancing so Scots are fairly familiar with the dances. We’ve been to a few of these now and are slowly getting better.

Even Daniel managed to hobble around. Last Thursday we got him a special shoe from Amazon so he could try walking without the crutches – he still can’t get his foot into his regular shoes. He’s been doing very well limping around without the crutches and managed to hobble through several dances. There was also somewhere there in a wheelchair dancing so it shows how accessible these events are.