It was my friend Cecilia who sent me a You Tube link to Scottish comedian Danny Bhoy’s hilarious but oh so true to life desciption of a ceilidh, or Scottish country dance.
The comments are amusing too as so many people have had exactly that experience. I know I have! Thanks Cecilia.
Last week when I wrote a brief post about our fairly recent visit to Avebury in Wiltshire I wanted to link to my previous visit the The Ring of Brodgar on Orkney in 2022, for comparison. It was only then that I discovered that I had never got around to blogging about it, either in 2017 or 2022. Or if I did the posts have disappeared!
So here are some photos that I took, the Ring of Brodgar in the distance.
A bit closer.
Looking across the Loch of Harray towards The Ring of Brodgar.
And the standing stones from the other side of the ring.
The stone circle itself is large, as are the stones. Below is a photo of Jack beside one of them. They’re not as chunky and rough as the stones at Avebury.
You can read more about the stones here.
A few months ago we visited the Tartan exhibition at the V&A in Dundee. It runs until the 14th of January 2024. I wasn’t all that sure if I wanted to see it to be honest. In Scotland we have a history of leaving tartan to the tourists, but I enjoyed the exhibition which has the oldest piece of tartan on show, but it’s not all history. There are tartan outfits by designers such as Vivienne Westwood who was fond of using tartan as are some Japanese designers. Sadly I can’t remember who designed the modern outfits below.
Some designs are quite wild!
Then we get back to a bit more traditional, allthough I’m not sure about the bikini top below.
Of course Victoria and Albert were very keen on tartan, so there was a lot of it about in their time, not bad considering it had been completely banned by the government after the Jacobite rebellions.
More modern again.
Below is an army recruitment poster.
Below is some tartanware Mauchline Victoriana, made from wood. There are shortbread tins and such in the exhibition too. Tartan seems to have ended up on a lot of merchandise over the years.
Below is a portrait of the actor Alan Cumming, with a kilt wrapped around his neck, and nothing else on for some reason.
The outfits below are apparently Manhattan tartan. The colours are supposed to be the skin colours of the ethnic groups found in Manhattan. Designed by J Morgan and Suzanne H Bocanegra of New York. Pink is supposed to be Caucasian flesh colour. See also Manhattan Financial.
Just recently Billy Connolly donated a kilt to the exhibition. He explained that when he was a youngster you rarely saw a man in a kilt, and if you did see one then the kids all chanted Kiltie, kiltie cauld bum at them! It’s absolutely true, it’s only in recent years that kilts have become so popular to bridegrooms, and then of course there’s the Tartan army, Scotland’s football supporters but they didn’t get a mention in the exhibition at all.
Although I enjoyed the exhibition I felt that there were some glaring misses. If I had been setting it up I would have asked for donations of stage clothes from Rod Stewart, The Bay City Rollers (a fan donated her tartan trousers) tartan was popular among punk bands. The film below is about the making of Billy Connolly’s kilt, they got him into one at last! Honestly someone should have ironed or steamed it as it’s badly wrinkled now, it’s a real shame it wasn’t taken good care of. You can see Jack’s post on the exhibition here.
We’re back at Blackness Castle which is apparently in Clackmannanshire, the smallest county in Scotland, it’s not far from Stirling. From the photo below you can see how solid and high the towers are. The gateway that you can see is where there’s a we drawbridge that leads out to the river walkway where supplies used to be unloaded for the castle, directly from ships.
All of the rooms in this castle seem to be barrel vaulted, no doubt for strength. I’m sure that some of the rooms were used in filming Outlander most recently.
There are stairs all over the place as you can see below. It was an incredibly blustery day as it almost always is at the River Forth but strangely as soon as we got inside the castle it felt very safe, quiet and – warm! Some of the walls are around nine feet thick, where they were in most danger of getting attacked by cannon I suppose.
It could feel quite cosy with tapestries on the walls and heavy curtains and maybe a nice carpet underfoot, or at least rushes. I’m not sure if the room below originally had a low ceiling in it. On the right hand and above the window it looks like the remains of a fireplace.
As is often the way with old castles a lot of the rooms have a medieval ‘en suite’ off the main rooms as you can see in the photo below. All mod cons, well it’s a long way up and down to the ground floor. No ‘garde looing’ here! But it does look a bit cold to be dangling your ‘bahookie’ over the hole.
Below there’s even an alcove where you can wash your hands, but I don’t think it’s within the toilet area, maybe a good thing.
I particularly like the windows, the shutters open if you need fresh air.
And I can just imagine this as a good place to read – if there were plenty of cushions on the window seats.
The castle has been modified a lot over the centuries and the photo below show what was the original entrance, which is now blocked up. It’s much bigger than it looks in the photo.
The garden, below was the last bit which we visited, as you can see the weather had cleared by then. It looks quite industrial on the other side of the river, because it is. The blue crane thing to the right of the middle is actually at Rosyth, the naval dockyard. So this area of the River Forth is still about defence!
Blackness Castle became Fort William in Outlander, and it was where Jamie received the lashes from the dastardly Captain Randall – ooh err!
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 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.
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.
It was my birthday fairly recently, but as we had been travelling a lot I decided I didn’t want to stray far from home on that day. We just went out for lunch to a place nearby, and after that we went for a wee walk and I took some photos along the way.
The field is close to the historic village of Falkland.
Then it started to rain so we went home. I had a good day though.
We just had to stop to take photos of Craigellachie Bridge before we drove over the modern bridge. It isn’t a stone bridge, apart from the ends, it’s iron but very elegant anyway.
It’s near the village of Aberlour in Morayshire, north-east Scotland. The bridge was built by the famous civil engineer Thomas Telford in 1812, it took two years to complete it.
Craigellachie Bridge spans the River Spey, famous for salmon fishing in the past but nowadays it’s very much a catch and return policy. Salmon are so scarce and have to be conserved.
A couple of weeks ago we visited St Andrews. Our favourite lunchtime cafe was full up, well we were offered the tent in the back garden but as it was almost blowing a gale and cold we decided against that. So we ended up in the cafe where Catherine met Prince William (for coffee) when they were students there. We had never been in it before, it’s definitely a studenty place. Jack ordered a toasted cheese bagel with beans, and he was astonished to see when it arrived that it was baked beans. I think he imagined something a bit more exotic, I think he enjoyed it anyway – it was different.
When we left the cafe I noticed that there was something interesting in the wall across the road, on closer inspection it turned out to be a Fitzroy Barometer.
You can read about it here.
It seems that they had one of these instruments on HMS Beagle to help them predict the weather but apparently they now know that the crystals inside the glass form different patterns when the temperature changes. We have a smaller much less fancy version of one which was given to us as a weather predictor, but it’s interesting to watch the crystals change anyway.