Scotland Recap in Pictures - The Borders

On our second day in Scotland we headed south, to the lovely but often passed-over Border country.  This is the region where Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott hail from, and most tourists skip while scurrying off to the Highlands.  The gently beautiful scenery of these counties belie its turbulent and bloody history--it was sacked, pillaged, and burnt time and again during the Wars of Independence with the English.  All that, combined with lame-o King Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries campaign, has left us the ruined skeletons of Melrose, Dryburgh, Kelso, and Jedburgh.  We went first to Melrose Abbey, built of red-sandstone and originally founded in 1136 by Cistercian monks:    

Apparently Robert the Bruce's heart is buried here (the rest of him is buried at Dumferline Abbey--medieval folks had no qualms with splitting up their bodies if they wanted to be buried in more than one place).  The Bruce had always longed to go on a Crusade, so he asked that his heart be taken by his knights to the Holy Land after he died.  The knight and the heart only made it as far as Spain, where apparently it got lobbed at the murderers of the knight in his last ditch attempt to . . . defy the thugs by throwing a dead king's heart at them?  I didn't really get that part of the story.  At any rate, somehow the heart made it back to Scotland and it now lies in ye olde leaden box beneath the abbey grass.

I was sprawled on the grass, taking pictures of awesome old tombstones, and got this awesome view of the abbey and Josh's hair looking suspiciously like a bowl cut.

The exterior of the abbey was designed by a French master mason whose name I've forgotten, but it is delightfully and quirkily ornate.  Dad would have died over all the gargoyles--men, dragons, angels, saints, and all kinds of strange beasties.  I liked these two guys:

This fellow is one of the most famous gargoyles in Scotland.  It is, indeed, a pig playing the bagpipes:

After lunching in the shadow of Dryburgh (we didn't feel like paying for two abbeys in one day), we drove to Kelso, where we saw the humble remains of the abbey there (not enough left for them to ask people to pay), parked our car and began our 13.5 mile trek to Jedburgh.  Here I am, looking cheerful around mile 6 or so:

The country was fairly idyllic--the Teviot on one hand, and all this on the other hand:

And this:

And this:

And this!  Oh glory:

And this is how we started looking around mile 10, until we finally limped into Jedburgh, caught a bus back to Kelso, lurched into a pub, and then inhaled our burger and salmon in an ungodly amount of time:

Scotland Recap in Pictures - Edinburgh

Now that we have returned to humid Virginia, we would like to relive our trip with all of you with some choice pictures. First, we'll be recapping our Edinburgh days, which were days 1 and 10.

This is the view of Edinburgh Castle from Princes Street in New Town, about an hour or two after sunrise. Meanwhile, we had been walking for about an hour trying to find an open bakery at 7am on a Saturday . . . no luck.

The castle from the same vantage point, taken the day before when it was cloudier:

The front entrance to the castle, looking formidable. Almost as formidable as Josh's hair would have been if he weren't wearing that thing on his head:

Another view of the castle coming down from the Royal Mile toward the National Gallery of Art in New Town:


In the gardens on Castle Hill, looking back on the spires of the Royal Mile:

This is a sweet two-tiered, colorful street leading down from the Royal Mile to Old Town via Victoria Square:

Saturday morning we got up before the crack of dawn to be at this place in time for the dawn. We are standing on Calton Hill at the Dugald Stewart Monument, looking out over Edinburgh toward the castle, which you can see in the distance:

The skyline of Edinburgh, taken on our final night in Scotland while hiking Arthur's Seat around sundown. Arthur's Seat is a gorgeous hill that rears up out of Holyrood Park at the end of the Royal Mile, at Holyrood Palace and the Scottish Parliament. Local legend says that when King Arthur returns, he will come to this hill (basically every corner of Britain has its own legends and myths surrounding Arthur). Less fanciful but perhaps more important, Arthur's Seat was the site where Orson Pratt dedicated Scotland for missionary work in May 1840. He asked the Lord for 200 souls and when he left 9 months later, there were 229 members in Edinburgh. Not bad. Neither is the view:

And to close it out for Edinburgh, here is a very hungry and excited Josh with a Scottish lamb shank, served with mash and drenched in bacon and mushroom flavored gravy:

Clumsy Adventures by AM #2

Apparently one should keep an eye on the spoon while eating chili. I was multi-tasking at work (staring at my screen, clicking the mouse with one hand, and shoveling chili into my mouth with the other), which has been known to bring about calamities. Eyes fixed on the monitor, I assumed the chili would go where my blind hand was guiding it: into my mouth.


I was surprised to feel something thunk against my stomach, then strike me in the thigh. Sure enough, it was a ping-ponging, renegade garbanzo bean, leaving a smear of tomatoey chili sauce on my shirt AND my pants. Discombobulated by the thought of all my impending meetings with chili stains all over my clothes, my body decided to leap to action before checking to see if my hand was properly disengaged from in-between the arm of the chair and the desk. It was not.

Sure enough, I stood up while my hand remained lodged between the chair and the desk, resulting in a lovely red welt along one finger to match the lovely red splotches on my shirt and pants. The only good thing about the whole experience is that this time in didn't happen in front of the guy who works in Contracts.

Scotland the Brave

Time is too short, but we wanted to details of a few of our Scottish adventures! We are currently perched on the grassy hillside of Dunflodigarry on the Trotternish peninsula of the Isle of Skye. It is paradise. The view looks directly out onto the water, and grassy hills surround us, with the dramatic, forbidding cliffs of the Quirang at our backs. We've been bless with some uncharacteristically (for Scotland) sunny weather. It's been amazing. AM has indulged me in letting me drag her at various times during the early morning to places where light from sunrises would be nice.

A few highlights of the trip thus far:

*Edinburgh is perhaps the world's most photogenic city. It is a gorgeous old mound of black rock and grey stone, all growing together in a gloriously romantic and organic combination of natural beauty and civilization. It is also beautifully in bloom -- pink blossoms float around the dark stones; lilac grows in the hedges; yellow furs spread across the hillsides. We climbed Calton Hill at sunrise on Saturday (not difficult to do, as we were jetlagged, AND our dodgy hostel was filled with bizarre and shrieking characters; I felt like Jane Eyre, shivering in my bed, listening to unknown persons giggling like maniacal apes at ungodly hours of the morn) to see the lovely spring dawn creep over the hill and shine on the far castle.

*Ruined abbeys are among the loveliest structures in creation. Walking 13.5 miles between various of them, however, is really exhausting. We hiked from Kelso to Jedburgh, and I thought it was only a 12 mile hike when I suggested it; once I had the map in hand from the information office, I decided to keep that little fact hidden from Josh until we were on the road. I thought it would be a fun surprise: "Actually, we didn't hike 12 miles in 4 hours; we hiked 13.5!" (AM seems to think I am some witless and illiterate fool that can't read maps or signs, or tell the difference between 12 and 13.5, but whatever) The first 8.5 miles went very quickly--a little path that wound beside the Teviot River, dotted with heron, swans, and ducks, hemmed in by gorgeously vibrant fields of yellow rape seed. This is Walter Scott and Robert Burns country--lush, verdant, peacefully humming with natural life. We passed the ruins of an old castle and trailed along the old railway line. We ate apples as we walked down a path in-between hedgerows and fields of green and yellow, the hedges springing up with wildflowers in pink, white, and purple. The last 5 miles culminated in a near vertical scale of a hillside on an old Roman road--smooth, rounded cobblestones poking out beneath the dirt. We had a trusty Powerbar to thank for making possible our last crippled lurch into Jedburgh as we raced/limped to make the 7pm bus back to Kelso.

*Glasgow was nice but the street lights were long, and we only spend a few hours there for church and some museums. We did learn that someone from Glasgow is called a "Glaswegian."

*Loch Lomond and the hostel at Rowardennan is still absolute paradise on earth--one of the most peaceful places I've ever been, eliciting happy contemplation in the most effortless way. Bluebells cloaked the forest floor, and the loch sparkled in the evening sun as we took a stroll before making ourselves dinner in the well-remembered hostel kitchen. There were no small family rooms in that hostel, so I slept in a room full of awesome middle-aged English ladies hiking the West Highland Way, and Josh slept in a room full of smelly but cheerful Scottish laddies hiking the West Highland Way. I much prefer the hiking crowd to the drunk, lay-about, maniacally-screeching-at-4am crowd. This is also where we received the surreal news that Osama Bin Laden was done for (one of the English ladies was checking the news on her BlackBerry that morning; Henry Crawford had also died, which was even bigger news to them).

*The Highlands. There are some awesome, rugged old Scotsmen out here. We passed two of them on our way up to the Lost Valley at Glencoe as they were going down. We were heaving for breath and covered in sweat, and they were walking past us in all their silver-haired glory, waving their walking sticks and nodding their hats at us. Hardcore gents! You wouldn't catch me on an incline like that in my golden years; it would spell a broken hip or two for sure. The Lost Valley was well worth the incline, however. The path led up between two of the Three Sisters (rugged peaks at Glencoe), following a babbling brook and waterfalls, affording dazzling vistas of the Highlands the higher we climbed. It led to a hidden valley where clans used to hide their stolen sheep and cattle from raids. To us, it offered a lovely place to picnic and commune with the ghosts of my murdered MacDonald ancestors (Glencoe was the site of the 1692 massacre of the MacDonalds by the black-hearted Campbells).

*Ft. William--although we hadn't counted on having to pay for a 10 minute, 10 dollar ferry to the other side of Loch Linnhe, the view from our inn was well worth it. There had been an inn on that site for 600 years, the present building existing from the mid 18th century after its predecessor was burnt down during the Jacobite wars. Our window looked directly out over the loch and all the mountains that framed it, AND we had a canopied bed (childhood fantasy . . . way too many Disney princess movies).

*Isle of Skye--the highlight thus far was our evening hike to the Quirang last night. It ended up being steeper and longer than we had anticipated, which resulted in a scramble on the way down to beat the fading light, but it was worth it a hundred times over. The Quirang is a mass of soaring basalt rock--grass topped cliffs jutting out against the skyline, looking out over tumbling green valleys below and the sea beyond. Josh told me before we started that he felt like he was about to go on a first date with a girl he liked. I asked for clarification (eyebrows arched). He said that the anticipation and excitement was such that he was afraid he would just end up being disappointed (he's been staring at a picture of the Quirang on our Scotland calendar for 4 months now, salivating over it). His nervous excitement manifested itself in the frenetic pace he took, straight up the mountain. I followed faithfully, cool and steady as a plow. The sun had already passed beyond the Quirang but it was still a little less than 2 hours from setting, so the valley was already in shadow. After turning off the road we wandered on spongy grass sheep trails, past a still dark loch, gaining in steepness as we went. We crested the top of the first incline and wound around the top of a rocky valley, turning right and climbing over an ancinet stone wall. The view at this point was beyond breathtaking--valleys stretching before and behind us, brooding steep cliffs on either side. We headed west, towards the setting sun, and could see its reddish light hitting the summits above us. It was another scramble up to the top of the cliffs, and then I made a made dash for where the red light was striking the rocky chimneys at the top of the cliffs. It was absolute glory--the sunset before me, the sea behind me, endless stretches of green cascading below me. We then moved in the other direction as quickly as possible, for we were after Josh's "first date"--a great grassy plateau in the middle of the Quirang called The Table. This required much more scrambling and heaving over vertical rises, and is where my pace became particuarly plow-like and Josh became an ever-quickly vanishing frenetic dot in the distance. In the end, we made it, staring hundreds and hundreds of feet down upon The Table. But the sun had set, and this meant we had to haul it down before we started breaking ankles and such. It's a good thing we're not superstitious. Those dark, haunted valleys, perfectly still in the falling night, would have been a playground for an imagination not hemmed in by the confines of rational, modern thought . . .

*Hair. Josh's hair is enormous and sentient. The lower parts of it lay flat and silky down his neck (yes, mulletlike), while the upper layers magically take on an astonishing amount of volume, giving it a bouffant appearance. I have many pictures of it in all its varied moods (I have many pictures of Josh in general, especially pictures of Josh taking pictures), and I sense a blog post coming on when we return.

*Food. Hooray for British yogurt! As marvelous as ever. The same for the cheese, the crisps, the chips, the chocolate, and the steak and ale pie. Josh has yet to try haggis, although he is planning on it. I had it when I was in Scotland make in '01 and consider that box checked.

*Happiness. Abundant, in the extreme. This is such a beautiful, haunting, enchanting place--it's no wonder it has been romanticized for centuries. We wish you could all be here with us!