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Geo: 56.5851, -3.99899
It took forever to get out of Edinburgh this morning because of commuter traffic. It was as bad as Seattle!
We stopped at a viewpoint to see the three bridges over the Firth of Forth. The first one was built in the 19th century and was admired by Gustave Eiffel. It was (and still is) used solely as a railway bridge and was one of the marvels of its day; it's a World Heritage site today. The second one was built in the 20th century and is the automobile bridge. However, due to accidents involving heavy goods vehicles and ordinary passenger cars, a 21st-century bridge is being built. This will allow the heavy goods and regular vehicles to travel on different roadways. It's quite unusual to see three centuries in a row like that.
We got to the town of Culross (pronounced kyewl-riss) and visited Culross Palace. It was built by a man named (Sir) George Bruce in the 1500s. At that time, a big house was called a "place," which eventually got corrupted to "palace." It's by no means what we think of as a palace; it's just a wealthy man's house. It's been used as a filming location several
times in the "Outlander" series, which everyone seems to be obsessed with.
Anyway, Sir George built his wealth on coal and salt. He figured out a way to mine an underwater coal seam that kept the coal dry and reduced the risk of random explosions. He built a sort of tower out in the water and put a vent at the top. On land, horses worked a wheel that pumped out the seawater. This was in the late 1500s!
With the coal he was able to boil away salt from the seawater, and, of course, salt was a precious commodity in the days before refrigeration. He traded the coal and salt with Holland and in this way became wealthy. Socially, he was ahead of his time. He treated his workers very well, making sure they were well compensated and housed, and by all accounts he was just an all-around good guy. There was a portrait of him in the house, and he did look like a nice gent.
Linda, the guide at the Palace, showed us various rooms (and made sure to point out what had been used in "Outlander"😉 and told us about how the terms cupboard (a board to put cups
on), chairman of the board (the dining/work table was just a board on legs and the person who had the biggest chair was the chairman of the board), and piss poor (if you were too poor to buy your own chamberpot, then you didn't have a pot to piss in) came about. She was very funny and we had a good time with her.
She told us that Sir George's ghost has been known to show up from time to time. In the 80s, a mom and her little girl were in one of the bedrooms that was attached to Sir George's strongroom. Mom was trying to get her daughter to leave the room, but the daughter wouldn't go. A docent heard the commotion and went to find out what was happening. When he asked the little girl why she didn't want to leave, she said she wanted to stay and wave to the nice man. "What nice man?" The little girl smiled and waved into the strongroom and replied, "The man with the white around his neck and the beard. He's waving at me too." Well, of course, neither the docent nor mum could see anything. Linda then showed us
Culross
That's about 33% of the town.the portrait of Sir George: he's wearing a fashionable white ruff and has a pointy beard.
Later on the bus Martin played The Proclaimers' "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)." It felt like the soundtrack for a driving-through-Scotland montage scene in a movie.
Our afternoon stop was in St. Andrews. I had been there with Didi in 1998, so didn't really feel the need to visit the golf course again. Roddy, our driver, did drive us around so that we could see the Old Course and the clubhouse. We were dropped off in the center of town, and a few of us went up to see the remains of the 12th-century cathedral. Only a few structures are left standing: the entrance, where the high altar would have been, a bell tower, and a portion of one wall. But when it was whole, the cathedral must have been enormous. It fell into disuse during the Scottish Reformation in the 17th century and wasn't looked after again until the 19th century. The graveyard is still there.
Lisa, Ann, and I went looking for lunch and ended up at a place called The Cottage Kitchen in a wynd. It looked unassuming and turned out
St. Andrews Cathedral
The structure in the distance is where the high altar would have been. to be really good. I had a bowl of ham and lentil soup with a small slab of bread. The soup was very tasty, and the bread was nutty and crunchy and absolutely delicious. Afterward, I got ice cream. Mmm!
Driving along later, I saw bunnies, pheasants, and loads of sheep. It's spring, and there were lots of little lambs about too. They're awfully cute. Some were still very small, but others were a bit bigger and old enough and bold enough to band together on the other side of the pasture from the ewes. I saw a few calves here and there too. Also, deer. The hills are rolling and mostly green, though we saw a couple of fields of not-quite-completely-in-bloom rape.
James gave a short talk about what the Scottish education system is like. It's mostly like England's, but where English children will learn a few subjects in depth, Scottish children will learn a lot more subjects, so the Scots are better educated than the English. Because James lived on the Isle of Lewis, which didn't have any facilities for secondary education, he and all of his classmates were shipped off to boarding school for the years 16-18. Most of
St. Andrews Cathedral
The tower was part of the entrance. his classmates went on to higher education and two even went to Oxford, a big deal for boys from the Isles.
We arrived in Kenmore around 5:30. The Kenmore Hotel claims to be the oldest hotel in Scotland. My room is up a flight of stairs, through a door, up another flight and a half, down a short set of stairs, and through another door. I don't have a view, but the little town is situated on the River Tay and Loch Tay and is very picturesque. Before dinner I walked up to the town's church. It's Church of Scotland with a lych gate and a graveyard. I found another Scrimgeour, as well as a memorial stone from the mid-1800s to a maharajah's daughter and his maharanee. I'm desperately curious why a tiny church in a tiny town in Scotland has a memorial like that.
We had dinner in the hotel. There is literally nowhere else to eat, the town is so wee (to borrow a wonderful word from the Scots). We had carrot and coriander soup for starters, and I had chicken for the main course. It was the strangest texture, and finally someone pointed out that it was made with
stuffing. It was okay, but the texture really put me off. Dessert was an ice cream sundae. Ice cream twice in one day: the sacrifices I have to make on these tours!
After dinner a bagpiper came in. Her name was Gilly (with a hard g) and she's been piping for 50 years. Now she is in a pipe band and also teaches kids the pipes. Someone asked if the kids want to learn the pipes or if it's forced on them. Gilly said that for the most part they're desperate to learn the pipes, mainly because they are keen on getting a kilt. She played short tunes, like Scotland the Brave and Amazing Grace, and also gave a little history of the pipes while describing all the parts of hers. The "hard" parts of her pipes were made in the 1860s, but the bag is actually made of Gore-Tex. She also described the parts of her uniform, which is very smart, and then invited anyone who wanted to to go up and try their luck on a different set of pipes. Jenise volunteered and it was the funniest thing. She blew and blew and blew until it looked like she
was trying to give birth, but she couldn't get any sound out of the pipes. Then Martin did it, Nanci did it, and Ryan did it. Jenise was dumbfounded and couldn't figure out what they all did differently. When I finally went up to bed, Jenise was with Gilly and was going to have another go. I never did hear if she was successful.
I'm hoping that the person in the room next to mine turns off their bathroom fan because it is
noisy.
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Mary
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You got me researching Sir George to see if he was descended from King Robert the Bruce. That apparently isn't the case, but Scotland's history is about as complicated as England's. An Anglophile's treasure trove.