OK, I'm thinking I'd better wrap this little travelogue up before I forget everything about the trip. It's already starting to go a bit funny--what are those cute little skirts the men wear there called, anyway?
Well, we left Polmaily House in Drumnadrochit on Saturday, July 3rd and headed back down to Stirling, where I spent the first semester of my senior year in college. That was the fall of 1990, and something happened that made me spend the next twenty years trying to think of reasons to go back. (No, I don't know exactly what that something was, but that's not the point here.) A day or two after I arrived back in 1990, my Uncle Roger met up with me and we spent a few days sightseeing. I'm not sure exactly where we went then except for North Queensferry, a little town to the east of Stirling, on the north side of the Firth of Forth. I'd thought we might take the kids there, since they have a good aquarium that I'd thought might make a change from castles and I remember liking the town, but as it turned out what the kids needed as a change from castles was actually no sightseeing at all. This was perhaps their favorite activity in Stirling:
Yep, running around and climbing on the rock in front of the little lodge we rented.
We did see a lot of castles. Stirling is located in right about the center of Scotland, not too far south of the Highlands and with a lot of farmland and rolling hills. Many of the most important battles in Scotland's history were fought in the area, and so it's not really surprising that you can't swing a cat around Stirling without hitting a few castles. In the three and a half days we were there, we saw three castles: Stirling Castle, Linlithgow Palace, and Doune Castle. As I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed about the prospect of providing useful and entertaining info about each right now, I'm going to let Paul summarize. I just asked him which of the three castles he liked best. First he said, "What about Edinburgh Castle?" so that says something right there. Then he went on:
"Edinburgh Castle has the minute gun, which is AWESOME. Linlithgow Palace has the adventuring sort of thing, you can just go wherever you want and explore. Doune Castle kinda also has that, where you just roam around, except you're also listening to a tour so that's really cool, PLUS it's the Monty Python castle." A pause. "Which one was Stirling Castle again?"
OK, so I think we're clear that his least favorite castle was Stirling, and I'd have to agree. They are in the midst of a restoration that will restore the castle to how it would have been in the 16th century, which means there is scaffolding and such up. The great hall is actually completed, so it's elaborately painted and hung with tapestries and looks a lot different from the cavernous grey rooms I usually associate with castles. Stirling Castle is also on an impressive hill--actually a volcanic plug of the same type Edinburgh Castle is built on--but for some reason it really wasn't as memorable as the ones we saw before and after.
Linlithgow Palace, on the other hand, was exactly what you hope a castle will be: a maze of cavernous rooms and spiral staircases and hidden nooks, AND we met my high-school friend Bill (who now lives in Glasgow) there. Not that I mean to imply everyone hopes a castle contains my high-school friend Bill-Who-Now-Lives-In-Glasgow--though he is an extremely nice guy--but it is very much an "adventuring" castle, as Paul said, meant to be explored.
Linlithgow Palace was built primarily in the 15th and 16th centuries as primarily a royal residence, so it's chock full of giant fireplaces and long corridors and seems to fit together in a Hogwarts way: rooms seemed to disappear and reappear randomly somewhere else. In one of the kitchens, for instance, people were doing cooking demonstrations, but when I tried to show Matt and the boys later, first I couldn't find THEM, even after I'd waved to them in a window across the courtyard, and then I couldn't find the kitchen again. Then when I was trying to show them the "second" kitchen, a dungeon-like room I'd happened across with one of the actors who was participating in the day's festivities (jousting was meant to be the focus, but had to compete with on-and-off torrential rain), I kept finding myself in the first one instead.
I'm not going to say anything else about Stirling Castle, but here are a couple of pictures (proof, at least, that Paul was indeed actually there):
We went to Doune Castle on the last day (we flew from Edinburgh to Dublin the day before we flew from Dublin home). Doune Castle's main claim to fame is that it is where much of the film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" was filmed. It is smaller and less elaborate than Linlithgow Palace, but has a free audiotour commentary by Terry Jones which gives not only pertinent historical information but also tidbits about filming the movie. Ian in a huge Monty Python fan, and he was in heaven. Actually, he said he fulfilled one of his lifetime dreams by standing on the ramparts of the castle and shouting down the insults shouted by the French guard in the movie. I have a poor-quality video I'll try to post at some point, but for now just picture Ian standing on the top of the castle shouting at the top of his lungs, "Your mother was a hamster! and your father smelt of elderberries! Leave, you filthy English pig-dogs! And GO AWAY, or I shall TAUNT you a SECOND time!" in a French accent.
And with that, I am going to wrap this up. We did do some other things, but if I don't post this now it will probably languish until Scotland wins independence from England.
Actually, I arrived in Stirling abut two days before you did. Stirling was the third and last stop of my two-week trip in Scotland, after Inverness and Aberdeen. I had already taken a day excursion to Edinburgh, and walked in Stirling.
Among other things, I had gone up the Wallace Tower. I thought that climbing it was scary then, and coming back down even more dangerous. I went to the University of Stirling campus, looked around, and asked about you. You had not arrived yet. Everything was new and modern, except the president's home. Apparently it was the home of the former landowner.
We went to Perth one day. I do not remember much about it, except that it was a pleasant town.
The next day we went to South Queensferry and saw the Forth Railway Bridge, which I regard as one of the architectural icons of the world. It was overdesigned, and conspicuously overdesigned, because it had been built a few years after a disastrous railroad accident on the collapse of another bridge in Scotland. We went to the local museum, which I liked, and had lunch at a well-known old pub, that had once been a coaching station.
Then we visited Dalmeny Castle, the home of the Earls of Rosebery. We did not have as much time as I would have liked. The Fifth Earl of Rosebery, who was a Liberal Prime Minister for a short time, had married the only child of one of the Rothschilds. Eventually, much of the Rothschild art collection had found its way to Dalmeny.
We ate dinner twice at my hotel, the Terraces Hotel. It was the second-best place where I ate in Scotland. The best was my hotel in Interness, on the River Ness. (I believe I had fish caught in the river a time or two while I was in Inverness.) The third night we went to a chain steak house which I believe had been recommended, but was my worst meal in Scotland.
One small story. I had told the people at the hotel about you, but some people do not get the word. We had eaten dinner at the hotel the first night. In the morning, I came down for breakfast. The waitress, who had served us the night before, asked, "Is the lady coming down for breakfast?" I told her that the lady was not coming down, because the lady was not there!
Posted by: Roger | 08/05/2010 at 01:22 PM