Gala at Moffat, Dumfries and Galloway

About a month or so ago we were travelling down to the north of England for a few days, just for a change of scene and as usual we stopped off at the couthie wee town of Moffat. We normally have our lunch there and check out the secondhand bookshop. Yes I did buy a few books!

Georgian Hotel, Moffat, Scotland

It was busier than usual but we put that down to it being a Saturday. Just as we parked the car – congratulating ourselves on managing to get a space in the High Street we heard pipers tuning up and realised it was their Gala day.
Pipers and drummers

The wee Border towns have been better at holding on to these old traditions, Moffat choose a ‘shepherd and lass’ each year and they’re in the carriage.

It was impossible to get photos without people in the way but you can also see the lovely cushioned hills in the background, perfect backdrop to any town.
Moffat Pipers and drummers 3

Moffat Gala Day, Horse drawn carriage

Jack took a couple of very short videos while we were there.

Shepherd and Lass Carriages, Moffat

Pipers and Drummers, Moffat

They haven’t got around to putting up a video of the 2019 gala yet but you can see a wee bit of what went on in the 2018 gala if you’re interested.

Back Home

We went on another British road trip last week and I managed to be organised enough to schedule some posts to be published while I was away, just in case I didn’t have access to the internet. It turned out that I didn’t feel much like being online anyway, I was too tired as usual, what with running around during the day.

We visited mainly places which we hadn’t visited before. It’s sad but true that I enjoy visiting places in the UK which I’ve heard about, mainly on the TV or radio – often just on road traffic reports, and I wonder what they’re like if I’ve not visited them.

So now I can envisage Wigan, Haydock, Biddulph Gardens, Buxton, Alcester, Blenheim Palace (Woodstock and Bladon) Geddington, Market Harborough, Geoff Hamilton’s Garden at Barnsdale (Rutland), Uppingham, Oakham, Wetherby, Northallerton, Mount Grace Priory, Sedgefield, Washington Village, Morpeth, Rothbury, Cragside and Wooler. The only places we had visited before were Alcester, Blenheim/Woodstock, Morpeth, Cragside and Wooler.

This time we started off driving down south via Moffat in the Scottish Borders. The bookshop was open and I bought two books –
1. Murder Among Friends by Elizabeth Ferrars
2. Crazy Pavements by Beverley Nichols

It was a bookish beginning to our break, we were heading for Wigan, an unlikely place to visit but as I had just read George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier I was intrigued to find out what it was like now. It has a newish shopping mall but you can tell from the older buildings that Wigan was indeed down at heel in the 1930s. Unlike many places, mainly down south, there was virtually nothing in the way of art deco/1930s buildings. From which I assume that nobody was doing any building at that time, it was a very depressed area. It’s not exactly vibrant at the moment but it’s still an awful lot better than Kirkcaldy, my nearest large town, which seems to have yet another empty shop each time I visit it.

We stopped off at Buxton, mainly because it was a Georgian spa town and has associations with Jane Austen.

Sedgefield was chosen as an overnight visit mainly because it was Tony Blair’s constituency when he was an MP and I wanted to compare it with Kirkcaldy. In the end I didn’t even take any photos there as it was such a wee place with just a few shops, a village really. I feel quite unreasonably aggrieved with the inhabitants of Sedgefield for voting in Tony Blair as their MP and allowing Blair to set off on his egomaniacal merry power binge which has put us in the horrendous position we are in now.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to over the last week or so and I plan to show you some photos of the various places which I hope you might be quite interested to see.

What did I buy when I was away? Not a lot really, apart from some more books, but that’s another blogpost.

Moffat and no books

We stopped off at Moffat on our way down to the Lake District, it’s a pretty area and it has a second-hand bookshop. The author D.E. Stevenson lived there and is buried in the town. We parked the car in the High Street and within three seconds of getting out of the car we got into conversation with a local. This is something which would never happen in Fife – it taking a lang spoon and all that. Anyway, after the usual weather observations – well we are British – which included the info that we had come from Kirkcaldy, the chap said that he had been to Kirkcaldy once and it had been shut! Queue laughter!

However, I felt like tracking him down to tell him that Moffat was shut – as indeed it was! Apparently Wednesday is half day closing, but a lot of the shops hadn’t bothered opening up at all, including the bookshop. What a disappointment.

Moffat Book shop door

But as you can see from the notices on the door, there’s quite a lot going on in the wee town. Well they have a murder evening and a quiz night anyway.

In fact we should have taken this as a bad omen because there were hardly any bookshops in the Lake District, it would seem that hill-walking and outdoor pursuits don’t go hand in hand with reading books.

There was a big bookshop in Whitehaven, which is quite off the tourist beaten track but although there were loads of books I only found one which I wanted to buy, and it wasn’t one I even knew about, but it was a D.E. Stevenson as it happens, called The Musgroves. I think that it isn’t one of her amusing ones though, it looks like a slushy romance, but it may just be that it has a terrible cover.

Apart from a book for one of my sons which I bought at Grasmere, that was it bookwise. Absolutely pitiful as I usually come home with an armful of treasures. When we got home I did manage to buy an old copy of J.B. Priestley’s Faraway, which I found in Kirkcaldy High Street of all places. The wee tobacconist at the east end has loads of books at the back of the shop, it was a complete revelation to us as we thought that he only had the few which he has in the window.

I don’t know why I’m complaining because I have hundreds of books at home, waiting to be read and I’ve just picked up Raven Black by Ann Cleeves and Losing Ground by Catherine Aird. I’ve also requested a couple of books by Joyce Dennys – Henrietta’s War and Henrietta Sees It Through. I haven’t read anything by any of those authors before, they’re all blogger recommendations.

Meanwhile my reading rate has slowed right down, I’ve been reading Georgette Heyer’s Duplicate Death for about a week now, that’s what happens when you go away.

Moffat, Scotland

We stopped off at Moffat on the way down to England last week, just to stretch our legs a wee bit really but the last time I stopped off there I hadn’t realised that the author D.E. Stevenson had lived in the town and is buried in the local cemetery. If you’re a fan of D.E. (a Dessie) and it’s not so easy for you to get to Moffat you might be interested to see what the town is like. I think she was very fond of the place.

A street in Moffat, Scotland

It’s a really small town but it is set in lovely countryside and I can see that it would be a pleasant place to live, it’s far enough away from big places to make small privately owned shops commercially viable so it’s more interesting than lots of bigger towns. Mind you having said that it has an Edinburgh Woollen Mill shop and I was amazed to find that there was one of those in almost every English town that we visited, even Braintree. Moffat even has a bookshop which sells new and second-hand books, and even buys books back from you after you’re finished with them!

A side street in Moffat

The photo below is of a small street at the end of the main street and the houses are very typical of Scottish houses which are about 100 years old.

Moffat, Scotland

The buildings are very definitely Scottish architecture, it isn’t just the fact that they’re built of stone and not brick.

Post Office in Moffat, Scotland

We walked around a lot of the cemetery but couldn’t find D.E.Stevenson. I thought she would have been signposted! I think she’s in there somewhere though and if you have to be buried then I suppose it’s not a bad spot to be, the trees and hills are pretty anyway and the countryside on the way into the town is lovely.

Moffat cemetery.

Next time we pass, I’ll have to do my homework first and find out exactly where D.E. lived and then I can take a photograph of the house and the plaque.

From there we drove on to Lincoln and by then it was chucking it down with rain. They get hardly any rain there and I believe that the farmers had been complaining of drought but obviously the rain wanted us to feel at home as Fife has had the wettest summer for nearly 100 years, in fact it has been the wettest place in Britain. I get the distinct feeling that rain clouds are following us about. If I’m not careful I’ll begin to feel like the Queen as rain almost always fell when she visited places in Africa in the past – only there it’s a sign of good luck!

I’m Back!

Well I did have every intention of blogging while we were away but we packed so much into every day that we were too exhausted to do anything in the evenings except turn the TV on and vegetate whilst wondering who would be the next MP to do something crazy, we didn’t have long to wait did we! Over five days we visited:

Moffat (on the way down)
Lincoln (very nice but it chucked it down with rain)
Grantham (the only place we didn’t like much)
Stamford (very pretty with quirky houses and grand buildings)
Cambridge (lovely but smaller than I had imagined)
Newmarket (also worth visiting)
Grantchester (made famous by Rupert Brooke, lots of thatched cottages)
Madingley (very beautiful but sad American war cemetery)
Ely (lovely cathedral and ancient town)
Braintree (where we used to live, all very different in a good way)
Witham (where I used to work)
Silver End (to see art deco buildings)
Coggeshall (a re-visit for us, very chocolate boxy)
Great Dunmow (more ancient quirky buildings )
Thaxted (stopped briefly to snap – amongst other things – Gustav Holst’s house)
Saffron Walden (I really loved this place, very old fashioned)

So you can see why we were exhausted! Very naughtily I bought 15 books from second-hand bookshops, details later. So I hope you enjoy photos of old towns and villages as I’ll be blogging about our travels soon. It’s just as well that Jack still has another week of holiday time left, recovery time!