Before we went around the palace at Culross we had a guided tour of the town. It looks just as it must have when the houses were built in the 16th century, if you ignore the cars!
In common with most coastal towns the whole town is built on a steep hill. When the National Trust took over the palace there were a lot of houses in the town which were derelict. Luckily the NT decided to take them on too otherwise they would have been demolished eventually. They rent the cottages out and apparently there is a long waiting list of people wanting to rent them. It takes about 6 years to get to the top of the list.
As you can see, crow stepped roofs and pan tiles are in use again, just like in Dysart. This photo has the market cross in it, there’s a unicorn on top of it. Unicorns are a symbol of Scotland.
There are a lot of different designs of houses, no two are the same as far as I can see, but they’re mostly white or pink but some are orange. I suppose they’re about the same age as the timber framed Tudor houses that you see in England but these houses seem a lot more solid. My own house is about 110 years old and I can’t imagine living in a house which is 400 or 500 years old.
If you do go to visit Culross make sure you wear flat shoes because the cobble stones aren’t the easiest to walk on. Thankfully though the roads are clean which they wouldn’t have been in medieval times, there was raw sewage running down the gutters then. It can’t have been pleasant for anyone but must have got worse towards the bottom of the streets. Typically the abbey full of monks and priests was at the top of the hill!
