On a Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago we drove out to the village of Falkland in Fife, Scotland. It was a nice day, and now that I think about it, it was actually the Saturday of the Jubilee weekend, so Falkland was busier than usual. It’s a shame they didn’t have such good weather down south that Saturday, they were all drenched and drookit.

The lodge house above is one of my favourites although the water does run right underneath it, I’m not too sure I would like that. This pond used to be full of ducks and moorhens. What happened to them all?

I was standing on this bridge when I took the photo of the house, I wish I had such a lovely view from my living room window.

Anyway, we weren’t feeling energetic enough to go on a hill walk up the East or West Lomond so we just ambled around the land which surrounds the Falkland Estate. They have all sorts of things going on there.

If you walk over the bridge and go through the gate it isn’t long before you reach this memorial to some of the deceased inhabitants of the estate. There are quite a few graves inside a sort of mock medieval roofless church, one of them belongs to a son of the family, who had been killed during World War I. There are some gorgeous trees around the area and the slopes of the East Lomond are towering above the land. The tree with the pink flowers is a horse- chestnut.

If you look carefully through the trees in the photograph below, you should just be able to see some of Falkland Palace in the distance.

And this is a close up of a wee bit of the palace. In a few day’s time I plan to go into the palace, I haven’t been in there for years and I think you might find it interesting. It was the Hunting Palace of the Stuart Kings and Queens as this area was full of deer, in fact there still is quite a lot of wildlife around, including deer, they didn’t manage to kill them all. The palace was a favourite with young Mary Queen of Scots. If you want to know more about the palace, have a look here.