Stirling Castle

 

Stirling Castle is amazing, a huge stone built edifice perched on top of a rocky outcrop, it looms over the surrounding countryside and town. We visited twice, first after dark on the evening of our arrival in Stirling when these long exposure shots were taken and then again the day after to go inside and find out a bit about it.

My general knowledge of history is not great and there was an awful lot of information to take in here, lots of Kings called James to try and sort out in my head. A couple of facts that I have remembered are that Mary Queen of Scots grew up here and that a man, who was some sort of King's entertainer/scientist built himself wings using chicken feathers and tried to fly to France by jumping from the wall that this picture below was taken from. He landed in a pile of manure but lived to tell the tale.

 Quite a lot of the interior of the Castle such as this tapestry and wall painting is reproduction as it had been used as army barracks for a long time before being preserved.

 

The Wallace Monument as seen from Stirling Castle, we didn't make it up there but admired it from afar.

Dunfirmline Abbey and Palace

We picked stopping places fairly randomly on our Scotland trip, Dunfirmline is pretty beautiful. We only stopped long enough to have our picnic lunch in the car and a wonder around the Abbey and Palace ruins and then run into some squirrels into Pittencrief Park. Lovely

 

Hogmanay in Edinburgh

 I spent new year's eve in Edinburgh on the start of a weeks holiday with friends in Scotland. We had a super time. I've written a little bit about Edinburgh before, it's a city I feel quite connected to but don't actually know that well.
We booked our accommodation quite late and ended up staying quite a way out of the centre of Edinburgh, we hadn't had any breakfast so by the time we got into town we where hungry! Jenners department store used to be a rather fancy place, the central Edinburgh store still is but in general they're now owned by House of Fraser  and so not quite exciting. Either way we got a huge pile of food and felt much better.

The day passed with rather a lot of walking and being touristy. We headed for the Castle first, pausing to pose with a golden postbox and a piper then walked all the way down to the Scottish Parliament at the other end of the royal mile, then trekked back up again to see Greyfriar's Bobby

After all that walking we found a pub and spent a couple of hours in doors being warm and eating before heading out to the street party. The set up for the Princes Street celebrations is a bit confusing, there's a flat £15 rate to get into the streets then there are several different stages with stuff going on, some of which are very expensive and others have no extra fee. We were not particularly interested in seeing any of the bands but we love a cheesy dance party so we headed for a stage that had a big wheel to spin to decide what year to play music from. We danced it up until midnight stopping every hour for fireworks and then a huge display of fireworks at midnight.

 

 

 Happy 2013!

New Year in Scotland

I'm off today with two of my favouritist lady friends for a wee jaunt up to Scotland.
We'll be spending a couple of nights in Edinburgh including Hogmany. I'm very, very excited!
My Granny was Scottish so I've always done quite traditional things for new years eve, we've always had first footing and black bun and haggis (vegetarian haggis though for the past 15 years)
This will be my first actually Scottish Hogmany though.

I'm hoping to go swimming in the sea on the 1st in North Berwick, I think we'll have to see how brave I am though!