Day 27 – Friday 17 June 2016

Another typical English breakfast & departure at 8am where we thread our way through York as they go to work & school traffic. It gets worse as we get to nearby Harrogate & it is a lot of very slow stop-start before we clear the large town & out onto the Yorkshire Dales towards the small picturesque town of Settle. We pass a paddock full of large military golf balls, some form of radar installation. The Yorkshire Dales have one standout feature, all of the sheep paddocks have dry stone walls. There are dry stone walls up dale, down dale & around dale, they are everywhere, an amazing amount of work & time must have gone into the construction of them. There are lots of sheep, most with twin lambs, a lot of blackface sheep with a fair smattering of black sheep amongst the flocks. We have spotted a few long horn hairy cows too. The countryside is undulating low hills & lots of very green grass, with all of the houses, barns & outbuildings also built of stone.

We then start driving through the Lakes District, obviously passing some very picturesque lakes, with the countryside getting a lot steeper, with deep glacial valleys & rocky hilltops. There are lots of small streams running out of the mountains with the occasional series of small waterfalls & cascades. The stone fences are still very prevalent as well as the stone houses, though the style has changed, it appears to be a different type of stone that they build the houses with here. We stop for lunch at Grasmere, the final resting place of the poet William Wordsworth & his family members. We go for a slow walk around the old village, admiring the many stone buildings before stopping & having lunch in the Grasmere Park. Walking back to our coach we called into the local church & saw the gravestone of William Wordsworth before having a look inside the church of St Oswald. Back on the coach we twisted our way down the narrow valley, passing through the area that had the road destroyed 6 months ago by landslides & flooding. The whole area was very pretty. Just north of Carlisle we passed Hadrian’s Wall, built by the Roman Emperor Hadrian to separate England from Scotland to keep the invading Scots out.

Gretna Green, just over the Scottish border was our next stop, at the blacksmiths where so many young English couples travelled to so that they could marry, as the Sottish marriage laws allowed very young couples to marry (without parental approval). The English marriage laws were a lot more restrictive. They didn’t need marriage celebrants only a couple of witnesses, the couples would put their hands together on the blacksmith’s anvil & he would hit on either side of their hand with his hammer & wallah, they would be married. Even now 16 year olds can marry with parental approval. A lot of people marry or renew their vows in the blacksmiths work shop – because it is now considered romantic, it only takes 10 minutes to get married – that’s what I call a quickie.  As we were leaving it started to rain again & we were accompanied by rain most of the way to Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is a very different city, there are masses of long lines of multi-story stone buildings, our hotel, the Crown Plaza is a conversion of a row of these old stone buildings. We booked in at 5.30pm, it has been a long day of travelling.

Tonight we had dinner at Prestonfield, an historic building built in 1687, a short bus ride away. The large stone round stable building has been converted into a restaurant & a stage inside provides room for a cabaret show, the “Taste of Scotland”, running for the past 41 years. We are greeted at the door by a Scotsman in full regalia playing the bagpipes as we enter. We have both now eaten the renowned Scottish dish haggis, & it was pretty good. I had the fish & Tereza the steak & we were both very pleased with our meals. The cabaret show was excellent, consisting of Sottish singers & dancers, a very talented girl playing the violin, a man the piano accordion – he was very good, a great bagpipe player & some young girl highland dancers, the little ones nearly stole the show, especially when one of them sang with the sweetest voice. We were entertained very well, the show was non-stop with one number leading into the next, it was always action, the dancers were so energetic.

When we walked outside it seemed like that it was only around 8pm, however, checking our watches it was 10pm & the sun was in the process of setting, it was still daylight, such a strange sensation for us. From our hotel room I can see the other side of the Firth of Forth, many kilometres away & the sky is still light, at 11pm. Another great day, though long & a little tiring.

Today’s temperature maxed out at 14C, if this heat wave continues I will have to don my thermal underwear – we are so happy to be here in summer.