Holiday Diary - Day 15

The start of the 3rd week of our holiday saw us heading north for the day, up to Blair Atholl and a tour of Blair Castle, the home of the Murray of Atholl clan. Sue lays claim to this as part of her family history as her Great Grandmother (on her father's side) was Susan Murray.

It wasn't exactly what I was expecting of a castle, more of an estate manor.

Here are the some of the photos we took today.

Quite an impressive sight.

We were greeted by the sounds of the pipes as we drove up

I quite liked the sign on the rubbish bin

There seem to be a lot of these babbling brooks around Britain

I went for a walk around the garden

Saw lots of pretty flowers

And a family of swans (there are cygnets in the foreground and a couple of white swans further back)

I do have a close ups of these if anyone wants to see them but I had there were so many photos taken I needed to cull a few.

There were statues set in the walls.

And even vegatables (the broad beans looked quite healthy)

An oriental style bridge

Hercules keeps an eye on things

The view towards the southern end

The view towards the northern end

The Church of Scotland just across the road from the castle driveway

On the way back we mad a slight detour via Pitlochry so we could get a closer look at Lock Faskally and we found some other items of interest there too.

A sculpture of some otters and fish

A bench seat dedicated to a fisherman watched over by an old lady.

Loch Faskally

We made another detour to look at a craft shop but didn't see anything of interest there.

Tomorrow we head north again to Inverness via Glen Bogle.

Richard.

Holiday Diary - Day 14

This morning we had to do some backtracking as Sue left her folding stool in Newcastle. Fortunately, this didn't really take us further from today's destination and it only took us about an hour out of our way. Once we had done this it was on to Berwick-on-Tweed and then to Kinross in Scotland.

Berwick is a lovely little town with quite a history. Some of it shows in the following photos.

Things seemed to get foggier as we travelled north, but we found our way OK.

That last photo is of the Fourth Road Bridge. It's somewhere up ahead in the fog. It's quite an impressive structure so it's a pity you can't really see it.

Tomorrow we're off to see Blair Castle.

Richard.

Holiday Diary - Day 13

This morning, after going into Carlisle for breakfast, we headed south, down the west coast, to a place called Ravenglass. On the way there we saw more beautiful scenery, drove through another couple of sheep paddocks (I'm not entirely sure why the GPS insisted on taking us that way), had a clash of mirrors (hopefully that won't cost us too much) on a particularly narrow section of road and ended up on the same road we were on when we left Carlisle.

We were going to Ravenglass to catch another steam train, this time is was a miniature railway system from Ravenglass to Dalegarth For Boot. We saw lots of bridges, animals, other trains and train travelers.

Here are the photos. The first couple are of mountains that Sue could see in the distance.

We have plenty of photos taken along the tracks.

After our little train ride we went for a drive a little further south to Barrow-in-Furness before heading inland and turning north to Penrith where we stopped for dinner. Across the road from where we had dinner stands the remains of Penrith Castle.

Tomorrow we leave England for a little while and head into Scotland.

Richard.