Arbilot Falls, Angus, Scotland

Posted on 25 August 2024 by Katrina

A couple of weeks ago we travelled up to Aberdeenshire to stay there for a few nights, on the way up we stopped off at the tiny village of Arbirlot in Angus to see the waterfall there. We had driven past the sign to this place quite a few times but had never noticed it. I bought a Scottish magazine recently and it had an article on waterfalls which were worth seeing, so as we were more or less going past it we thought we might as well take a look at it. It isn’t massive but it is pretty, and quite noisy. We had thought we might have to walk a mile or so from the village to reach the falls but as soon as we got out of the car we could hear them, as you can see from the photo they are situated right by the bridge into the village.

There were a few people already there, a young couple and a family wading further down stream, we didn’t stay there long though as we wanted to get back on the road up to Aberdeen. We had a secondhand bookshop to visit. Annoyingly, when we got there it was shut! We have no luck with that bookshop. However, there was another one in the city and I did well there, so I can’t complain.

Alyth, Perth and Kinross, Scotland

Posted on 10 August 2024 by Katrina

A couple of weeks ago we grabbed a blue sky day and drove north up to Perthshire (Perth and Kinross) to do a bit of a road trip to small places that we hadn’t visited before. Such as – Alyth. I believe that’s the old pack bridge in the photo above, nowadays it’s for pedestrians only.

It’s a small town, quite historic, first mentioned in the 13th century. The Alyth Burn runs right through the middle which makes it scenic as there are several bridges going across it. Not surprisingly they have been bothered by flooding in the town. I was really chuffed to see some small fish in the burn ranging from about 6 inches to 8 inches. I’m always hanging over bridges to see what is in the water but more often than not there’s nothing to be seen!

Despite it being quite a small place it has even smaller places nearby which don’t even have a shop, or maybe just has one wee shop if they are lucky, so there were quite a lot of people around, so the large war memorial below was the only other photo I took. It’s on the outskirts of Alyth. There were a couple of plant stalls by the side of the road where I was standing to take the photo, small plants such as coleus and pelargoniums for just 50p each, so I chose four plants and put the money in the honesty pot. I should have taken a photo of the stalls, they were nice and colourful.

I would definitely go back there some time, to do a bit more exploring.

Sloten, Friesland, Netherlands

Posted on 17 July 2024 by Katrina

Sloten is another of the eleven ‘cities’ of Friesland, where they have ice skating races on the canals when they freeze hard enough.

The photo below is just so Dutch, boats moored outside your house, a canal, a lovely hump-back bridge and a windmill – what more can you ask for?

Well, another bridge with Jack standing on it is all I have of Sloten, it’s a very quiet but scenic small town. Even smaller than I thought when we were there, apparently it only has about 700 inhabitants. It’s the smallest Elfsteden in Friesland, the smallest of the ‘eleven cities’ five of which we have visited. Hopefully we’ll be able to visit the others some time in the future.

Hindeloopen, Netherlands

Posted on 13 July 2024 by Katrina

Hindeloopen is another one of the eleven ‘cities’ of Friesland, in north east Netherlands. I’ve always fancied being able to moor a small boat by my house so that I could just pootle about on a river, you can actually do that in the Netherlands, well their canals look just like rivers.

How scenic is the photo below, it almost looked like something from a children’s story book.

There are plenty of bridges and locks.

But Hindeloopen is very popular with sailors. I thought it would be similar to the coastal villages in Fife, but it was very different. There wasn’t much in the way of shops at all, just eateries, and there were millions of midges. You might think that coming from Scotland I would be well used to midges but I had never see anything like it, and it was a really windy day. I would hate to be there on a still day – if they have them.

There were lots more yachts than can be seen in the photos.

Beyond the harbour is the IJsselmeer. This used to be the Zuiderzee but in 1932 they constructed a dyke to close it off from the open sea, and now it is a freshwater lake.

It is very different from the North Sea in coastal Fife.

A snowdrop walk in Fife

Posted on 14 February 2024 by Katrina

Snowdrops in Balbirnie Park.

I spoke to an elderly man who told me that these snowdrops were grown commercially originally and as a young lad he had picked them and packed them into boxes for sale in the cities. The Victorian estate is probably why there was a railway station nearby.

There are several places advertising snowdrop walks, in rural estates where you have to pay for the privilege, but there is probably somewhere near you where you can admire the snowdrops for free. Within Fife in the east of Scotland there are swathes of snowdrops in Falkland, Glenrothes and Balbirnie Park. Unfortunately the snowdrops don’t look great in these photos, but the burn (stream) and trees look fairly scenic.

If you look closely at the photo below you’ll see a heron, almost in the middle of it, I love those birds but a friend of mine thinks they look like vultures and can’t stand them, I think they look elegant.

Balbirnie has some great trees in it, even some redwoods, but some haven’t survived.

Sadly, with all the terrible storms we’ve had to endure this winter there were also quite a few trees which had been blown over. The saddest one is in the photo below, I think it was a beech tree, going from the smoothness of the trunk, but it’s hard to tell when there are no leaves on trees and you can’t even see the shape that it grew in. If it was a beech tree it looks like it must have been between 150 and 200 years old, beech trees tend to fall over after 200 years anyway. It damaged some other trees on the way down, but bizarrely it landed across the length of what was a lovely wee stone bridge, and is now blocking it completely, I’m just amazed that the bridge hasn’t collapsed under the immense weight of the tree, but one side of it is badly damaged. It’s on council land and given the state of the budget it’s doubtful if it will ever be fixed.

As you can see they have already cut up some of the tree, but maybe they are waiting for more experienced people to deal with the rest of it. It’ll be an awkward job.

You can just see the intact side of the small bridge through the leaves in the photo above.

So many trees are lost with every storm we get, and as this winter they’ve been coming at the rate of two a week at times, it’s time some serious tree replacement started.

Sheepwash Bridge, Ashford in the Water, Peak District, England

Posted on 24 November 2023 by Katrina

On the way back from our recent-ish trip down as far as the south west of England we visited Derbyshire/the Peak District. I think this is one of the most scenic areas of England. The old stone humpbacked bridge above is called Sheepwash Bridge and has been named as one of the best bridges for people to play poohsticks from. It’s in the quaint village of Ashford in the Water. This village is mentioned in the Domesday Book and it used to be owned by the Cavendish family of Chatsworth fame, but they had to sell it at some point to pay death duties.

The bridge spans the River Wye, it’s a very pretty area as you can see.

There was a constant stream of people going over the bridge and I took the first photo of it with people on it as I had given up hope of it ever being empty, but then Jack managed to snap the one below with his camera – before anyone else went on the bridge – but by then I was in the way!

It’s a lovely wee village and river, but I bet the locals get fed up with the tourists!

Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire

Posted on 1 November 2023 by Katrina

Bradford on Avon is a small town, hilly and quaint, and it wasn’t until our last morning there that we actually found time to explore it as we had been so busy going elsewhere. It’s a good base for touring the area.

While I was doing a bit of research into the place I discovered that The Bridge Tea Rooms have won a ‘best tea room’ competition this year – and not for the first time, obviously we had to check it out. As you can see it’s housed in a medieaval building, you have to stoop to get through the door, even if you are small. It’s steeped in mock Victoriana kitsch, which might be what had attracted the competition judges, but it didn’t come up to the standards of any of the tearooms that we frequent in Scotland, where it’s normal to be given a choice of flavours of home-made jam with your scone. I could go a lot further but I’ll leave it at that! Possibly it won a competition for Victorian style tea rooms.

If you are into books and you are near the town you will definitely enjoy visiting the shop Ex Libris. Within about seven minutes I had found seven or eight books that I just had to buy.

If you love rivers and bridges as I do it’s almost worth visiting the town just for a look at this ancient bridge. We enjoyed our visit but it’s a ‘once in a lifetime’ visit for us as it’s a long drive from home.

Pulteney Bridge, Bath

Posted on 10 October 2023 by Katrina

One of the places that the Bath Heritage Centre suggests that visitors might like to see is Pulteney Bridge. So we walked to it, it is very close to the centre of the city. It was designed in 1769 by the Scottish architect Robert Adam. I have to say that it’s a thing of beauty, to my eyes anyway, and the weir is like nothing I’ve seen before.

At the heritage centre they told us that you had to pay to get into the garden to get down to the River Avon, but we felt it had been expensive enough to get into the Roman Baths so we just walked across the bridge and went down the steps at the end of it. They led to a little patch of greenery with some trees and benches, it was just perfect really. The boat in the photo below just turned around at that point and went back under the bridge as it can’t get past the weir.

Robert Adam was actually born in Kirkcaldy, very close to where we used to live, but as usual the local council demolished Gladney House which he and his brothers had been born and brought up in, just typical. It would have been such an interesting house to visit too.

Jack took this video of the weir

Blackness Castle, West Lothian

Posted on 11 September 2023 by Katrina

Blackness Castle sticks out into the River Forth, as you can see, it was apparently designed to look like a ship. You actually have to walk over a wee drawbridge to get on to this wooden walkway.

It’s a couple of weeks since we visited Blackness Castle, it’s not far from Bo’ness in West Lothian, it might be in Falkirk District now, they keep changing things! It’s one of the many places that was used as a location for Outlander, they had to cover the metal handrails with wooden panelling. It was also used in the filming of The Bruce, Zeffirelli’s Hamlet, Starz (?) Doomsday and Ivanhoe. Blackness was built in the 15th century.

Anyway, it’s not that far from where we live and possibly for that reason we just didn’t get around to visiting it until years after reading about the castle. For some reason I didn’t think it would be a very interesting castle – but it was. As usual there are a lot of spiral staircases involved.

It’s a long way up to the top.

In the distance you can just see the Forth Bridges below. As ever, if you click on the photos you should be able to see them enlarged. Tomorrow I’ll show some photos of inside the castle.

Knaresborough, Yorkshire

Posted on 21 August 2023 by Katrina

It was way back in November 2022 when we visited Knarseborough in Yorkshire. I’m way behind with blogging about places we’ve visited. We had never been there before but I had read about it, probably in a magazine or The Guardian. Anyway, obviously quite a lot of people had also read about it, it’s a pretty destination, but was quite busy, even in November.

As you can see Knaresborough Castle is still imposing despite being a bit of a ruin, it dates back to around 1100.

But the viaduct is probably more well known than the castle is, it’s very high.

Knaresborough is hilly and as you can see you get an even better view of the River Nidd from higher up. We had our lunch in the town, it’s a good place to stop off. We also visited Tadcaster, Thirsk and Harrogate on that trip, but for me this was the most scenic place.

Pining for the West

Meanderings about recipes, books, craft and more

Category Archives: Bridges