A walk in the woods – in Fife

Posted on 27 February 2025 by Katrina

Dust off your virtual walking boots if you fancy coming with me on a wee walk. It was cold this afternoon but the sun was shining so we decided to take a walk in the afternoon, it has been months and months since we did this walk.

We managed the very steep grassy hill much more easily than we thought we would, and that eventually leads to the snowdrops, they were a bit disappointing as that area seemed to have shrunk since last year, either some of the bulbs have rotted in boggy ground due to all the rain we’ve been having, or the local badgers have been scoffing them!

Sadly quite a few huge trees had been blown over in the recent storms and we had to divert from the path to avoid them. Trees are blown down at every storm nowadays, always the biggest and oldest of course, but there never seems to be any tree planting going on. I see young trees being thrown into the ground and heeled in on TV but what about the old woodlands? They need to be rejuvenated.

Anyway, it was really good to be able to stretch our legs among the trees for a change – and it didn’t rain!

Braemar – the Highland Games venue, Aberdeenshire, Royal Deeside

Posted on 12 February 2025 by Katrina

When we visited the Aberdeenshire area back in July we decided to have a look at the arena where they hold the Highland Games. It’s something I’ve seen on the news many times over the years – usually on the news with THE Queen in attendance in her tartan and tweed, while the rain battered down.

To be honest I wasn’t all that sure that I wanted to check out that area at all, but the teeny village only has a large Victorian hotel which is confusingly named The Fife Arms, and a couple of wee gift shops, or maybe it was only one, anyway it was shut so there wasn’t really anything else to do, except hang over a bridge to look at the River Dee. It was only when we got back home that I discovered that you can go for a riverside walk at Braemar. Below it doesn’t look much more than a burn (stream) but it was July and allegedly the weather had been good in June although we missed it all as we were in the Netherlands. Further research has me thinking that it might be the River Clunie which apparently flows into the Dee.

Below is a view of the scenery from the highand games field. I’m not sure what it’s called officially – a park, arena or maybe just a field.

The glazed shelter with the royal coat of arms on it is presumably where the so called VIPs view it all from, sheltered from the usual rain or if the weather is better – from the midges – maybe. There are folded chairs all around the place but I suspect parts of it are standing room only on the day.

This wee stage in the photo below must be for the Highland dancing exhibitions, that takes me back although I never danced at a Highland Games in my day.

So it’s just as well that the games park turned out to be quite interesting, and really quite stylish compared with the other places that the various Highland Games take place in, this one is definitely a step up from the usual local field.

My Scotland by Val McDermid

Posted on 31 January 2025 by Katrina

My Scotland by Val McDermid was first published in 2019, it has beautiful photographs by Alan McCredie and a foreword by Nicola Sturgeon, and is published by Sphere.

This is a beautifully produced book, with sumptuous photographs which are linked to some of her book locations. To begin with the focus is on Fife, where Val was born and grew up, there are plenty of places to ignite the imagination of a novelist, and it seems she has been salting away ideas since she was a youngster. This first chapter was all very familiar to me as I lived in Kirkcaldy for 26 years, and in the area where she lived, but it was nice to read of her links with the various places.

The East Neuk coastal communities feature, she mentions that most people probably never get through the doors of the old fishermen’s cottages but by coincidence, I also have relatives who lived in George Street, Cellardyke – as her aunt and uncle did. The atmospheric St Andrews nearby couldn’t be missed out.

There’s a chapter about Glasgow, a place she fell in love with as a young journalist, and then fell in love with again after she had moved away, and returned to find it much changed. It’s a city that’s close to my heart – as I was born there.

Obviously Edinburgh features, often there are excerpts from her books, linked to whichever area the chapter is about, and she mentions that even when a book had a mainly English setting she would feel the need to send her characters to a favourite area, somewhere in the Highlands where she had holidayed. At Loch Leven, by Kinross, Val is photographed on a bench where in a book she had placed a murder victim, overlooking the island where Mary, Queen of Scots had been held prisoner and eventually escaped from.

Linlithgow also gets a mention, for the ugliness of the 1970s/80s buildings that have been stuck right next to beautiful 18th century buildings. It’s one of my favourite towns, it’s so historic, but there’s no doubt you have to avert your eyes from the concrete brutality that was given planning permission in the centre of the town.

Obviously the Isle of Skye features too, a favourite place for lots of people, more than the places though this book is a really entertaining read and Val McDermid comes across as having a really warm and friendly personality. It was good to be in her company while I read it.

I borrowed this one from the library.

Warkworth Castle, Northumberland

Posted on 30 November 2024 by Katrina

So here we are back at Warkworth Castle in Northumberland, it’s a great place to visit but isn’t so accessible for disabled people like many of these places. It’s owned/run by English Heritage, it was owned by the Percy family in Tudor times. You can see my previous post here.

Parts of it are covered but others are open to the elements. I must say that the stonework looks in really good shape.

Below is quite a grand staircase.

But the stairs below aren’t for the faint hearted.

Below is a really lovely part of the castle which is roofed, it’s a sort of ante room and I can imagine people millling about in it chatting, and sitting on the window seats.

I really admire vaulted rooms although I’m always a wee bit nervous of them, I have to remind myself they’ve been good for centuries so are unlikely to fall on me!

I spotted this teeny wee iron lion rampant badge from the bottom of a flight of stairs, it seems to have been set above what looks like a stone sink, but it might have been a cupboard. The lion rampant was the Percy family’s emblem/badge, but is of course better known as Scotland’s emblem.

Below is a view of Warkworth village taken from just outside the castle. It’s a lovely wee place with plenty of eateries, but we were on our way further south so didn’t have much time to spend exploring the place, we spent so much time in the castle.

Portsoy, Aberdeenshire

Posted on 25 August 2024 by Katrina

Portsoy in Aberdeenshire was one of the many places that we visited a few weeks ago when we drove north to Aberdeenshire for a few days. The harbour dates back to 1692 and the photos wouldn’t really do it justice, it’s a series of small harbours interlinked. It means that there are safe areas for children to play in with quite shallow water, when the tide is out anyway. When we were there it was crowded with kids having great fun, the water would have been relatively warm too. So I wasn’t able to take photos of those parts because of all the people there.

The harbour has been used in various TV and films, such as Peaky Blinders, Whisky Galore! and various BBC period dramas, as well as in a Tennents lager advert.

The photo below is of the grass at the edge of the harbour, as you can see there’s a modern sculpture of a dolphin there.

I love just about any kind of ruin and this window is just about all that remains of a cottage above the harbour, presumably the weather played havoc with the rest of it over the years.

Portsoy is apparently famous for the marble which used to be mined there, there’s a marble shop there where you can buy various sorts of marble and carved stones. Portsoy marble was used in the Palace of Versailles, the marble is really red and green serpentine. It’s a lovely wee place, I would visit it again, if we are ever in that area again.

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.

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.

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.

Tantallon Castle, near North Berwick, East Lothian

Posted on 6 September 2023 by Katrina

Tantallon Castle, near North Berwick in East Lothian, is yet another ruin, but what a ruin it is, and what a great location!

As you can see there’s a fine view of the Bass Rock from the castle. This rock was used as a place to dump prisoners back in the day. With a sea crossing over notoriously rough waters to make if you tried to get off it it was in effect not escapable. Nowadays it’s a haven for seabirds.

As you can see from the photo below taken from the castle’s top floor it’s a long way up – or down, and there are parts of the castle which have been sectioned off as they’re deemed too unsafe for the public at the moment. There are a lot of spiral staircases involved but we were determined to see the whole place.

In the photo below Jack is surveying the walls, it’s definitely beyond his DIY skills!

Let’s look through the arched window. That takes me back!

Tantallon may look a bit grim now but as you can see from all the fireplaces below, it must have been quite cosy in its heyday. Just imagine the walls with tapestries on them and a flickering fire.

There was a harbour and ships came in loaded with whatever was needed to make life comfortable, and presumably guests also could arrive that way.

It was a bit blustery up there to say the least, but look at the fantastic colour of that orange lichen on the stonework, it’s obviously in its element!

Tantallon Castle is definitely worth a visit if you’re interested in history or like castles. It’s run by Historic Scotland.

Falkland, Fife

Posted on 25 August 2023 by Katrina

This year is going by in a flash and it’ll be September soon, but I’m casting my mind back to a sparkling day in March when we visited nearby Falkland. The photo above is of the lodge house at Falkland House. This used to be a favourite haunt of ours when we had wee ones in the family, before we even had our own kids to take there it was loved by our niece because at that time the pond was full of ducks and all sorts of water fowl. For some reason you never see any at all nowadays. The lodge house looks idyllic, but the water flows underneath it so that will be noisy and chilly I imagine. Below is a photo I took of crocuses but they’re dark purple so quite difficult to see.

To the left of the field above the ground slopes up to the Lomonds, I’ve never gone up that way, it looks too steep.

But walking over to the right from there you get onto a woodland path which leads eventually to Falkland Palace orchard. The wee waterfall below and the bridge are close to a popular children’s play park.

The view below is looking over towards the villages of Auchtermuchty and Dunshalt from the footpath which leads to Falkland Palace orchard. Nowadays Falkland is probably best known for being used as a location in the TV series Outlander.

In this post that I did way back in 2016 you can see the village when the film people converted the shops to look like they were in the 1950s.

Pining for the West

Meanderings about recipes, books, craft and more

Category Archives: Scenery