After the crap week I had, it turns out yesterday was just what I needed! Yesterday had kind of a gray start here in North Yorkshire, but the weather report said sunshine in Dumfries and Galloway, so we set out for Sweetheart Abbey around 7:30. It's a 3-hour drive to the village of New Abbey and it was still pretty socked in and windy but it wasn't raining... Anyway, I had somehow managed to let my Historic Scotland membership lapse, so I rejoined. One of the cool things I discovered yesterday is that Historic Scotland is now doing stamps of their properties (or the staffed ones anyway) and you can get your membership book stamped as you visit the places. The Japanese do a similar thing and I collected stamps while I was there.
Sweetheart Abbey is undergoing a major renovation right now, so there's lots of scaffolding but I still got a couple of good shots. We didn't stay long because it was cold and windy, so we headed over to the New Abbey Corn Mill, another HS property very close by. Now "corn mill" is a rather confusing description, since they were grinding oats--not corn--there, but I vaguely remember that "corn" is a generic term for cereal grains over here. They have a short film and then you get a guided tour; the mill is still in operation some days and they sell the resulting porridge oats at the shop there. They had some benches set up and we had lunch there--and watched a heron catch his lunch, too.
From there, we moved on to Dundrennan Abbey, which is supposed to be where Mary Queen of Scots spent her last hours in Scotland before her exile to England. It's a beautiful ruin and is normally a staffed property but there was no one there for the shop so I couldn't get my book stamped or get a guidebook. From there, we were going to head back to Caerlaverock Castle but first we stopped off at a couple of places we saw sign-posted.
Orchardton Tower is the only round tower house in Scotland and it was pretty neat. The first door you see leads to a lovely barrel-vaulted storage cellar; when you go back outside and walk a few steps around the tower, you come to the steps leading up to the living quarters. The rest of the floors and the roof are gone but they have a nice artist's rendition of what it might have looked like. You can still see where the floors would have been. From there, we went to Drumcoltran Tower, which was actually a farmhouse and sits today in the middle of a working farm, which gives you some idea of what it would have been like--without the mechanization :-)
And then we were on our way to Caerlaverock Castle, a medieval Maxwell stronghold. They have a good film there on the sige of Caerlverock Castle by Edward I in about 1300. Tony Robinson does the film and everything I hear him, I always think 'Baldric' from the "Blackadder" series :-) But he does a good job with the seige. The castle only held out for a day and a half, which may not sound like much but Edward had 3000 troops and 60 defenders held them off, which I thought was pretty good.
By this time, it was 5:30 and things were closing up, so we started home. The TomTom routed us right past Ruthwell Church, so we stopped--and the guy was only just getting ready to lock-up so he let us see the cross, an amazing Anglo-Saxon cross from around 600! We saw 7 sights all together and we even managed to drive by the Devil's Porridge to see what is up with that (it's a WWI exhibit), even though it was closed for the day. By the time we were blasting across the A66, the weather had truly gone to pot but we had a great day!
And amazingly, I finally lost another lb! FINALLY!! Even though this is supposed to be a PV day, I think I'm going to stick with my original plan and have a little mini-attak phase just to give the diet a good kick. So I'm down 41 lbs total. Yippee!
No comments:
Post a Comment