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: