The Stitch Up

Scotland - Last Day In Edinburgh

We came back to Edinburgh after our few days at Dalhousie Castle and moved into a really cool hotel called Ten Hill Place Hotel. It's really reasonable but also stylish - so if you're looking for good lodgings in Edinburgh, I recommend it. Also - the hotel uses a line of soaps and shampoos that smell SO good, called Scottish Fine Soaps. I grabbed all the freebies that I could from the hotel but I plan to order some stuff online as well. We even had a decent view from our hotel room:

That is "Arthur's Seat" behind the houses there. It's the main peak of a group of hills that form Holyrood park and it (as well as the rock that Edinburgh Castle sits on) was also formed by an extinct volcano system approximately 350 million years old. It's a great place for hiking although, we skipped the hike and just walked around town instead. Here's a better shot of Arthur's Seat with a pretty churchyard I photographed near Calton Hill:

This is a photo of the Nelson Monument. It sits at the top of Calton Hill and was built to commemorate Admiral Lord Nelson after his death in the Battle of Trafalgar. It looks like an upside down spy glass. You can go up to the top of the monument for a great view, but we were trying to fit a lot of sight seeing in so we just enjoyed it from the ground:


Here are a couple of additional photos I took from Calton Hill, which offers a great view of Edinburgh. The first is of the Firth of Forth, which is the estuary of the River Forth where it flows into the North Sea:

This second photo is looking down on Holyroodhouse Palace. Yeah, I was a little obsessed with the Palace. As you can see, the flag is up meaning that the Royals are still in residence and messing up my chance to tour the spot where Mary, Queen of Scot's secretary David Rizzio was murdered in 1566 and where the current Queen Elizabeh takes her tea. Dang it!

We took a stroll down Prince's Street and visited the Prince's Street Gardens which are beautiful and green and provide a great view of Edinburgh castle:

This is a photo of the Scott monument located in the Prince's Street Gardens. It was built to commemorate Sir Walter Scott, the writer of Ivanhoe and Rob Roy (among other books) who died in 1832. The monument was completed in 1846. It's another location that you can climb up for great views although again, we were on the move so we just snapped some photos at the base.

We had lunch on the "Forth" floor of Harvey Nichols. ("Harvey Nicks" if you're in the know - or if you watch too much "Absolutely Fabulous" like myself) It's called the "Forth" floor because you can see the River Forth from the windows of the cafe. It was pretty good food and a nice view. They also had a jazz duet which was relaxing after so much walking.
We hit the National Gallery of Scotland after lunch - they have a great collection that includes Reubens, Titian, Monet and Van Gogh as well as the largest collection of Scottish artists. It's a beautiful building as well and - Free!
After a quick nap at the hotel and a dinner of AWESOME Indian food, we took the 10 pm ghost tour with Mercat Tours. It was lots of fun. We learned quite a bit about Edinburgh history through our tour of the graveyard (spooky!) which culminated inside a tomb and almost made me pee my pants with fright. I guess that's what you want out of ghost tour though, right?
That pretty much wrapped up our visit to Edinburgh - but we will be going back to Scotland and back to Edinburgh soon. It's a great city filled with beautiful sights, great people and good food!

Scotland - Dalhousie Castle

We spent two and a half days of our vacation in Scotland at Dalhousie Castle & Spa. It's in a gorgeous location in the Midlothian area outside of Edinburgh. The walls of the foundation and the vaults of the castle are from the original building which was constructed in the 13th century. The main parts of the current castle were built in 1450. The land surrounding the castle and the castle itself have a long history dating from 1140 - there's not really enough space here to type it up but feel free to check it out Dalhousie Castle History.

The area surrounding the castle is just lovely. This is a photo of the view from our room. We were looking down on the little river and park area.

We took a walk around the grounds after we arrived. Everything was blooming and green and the weather was perfect: crisp and bright. Here are some snaps of the surrounding countryside:

We really took advantage of our time at Dalhousie to just relax and unwind. After our walk we hung outside for a bit just reading while soaking up the sun, the breeze and the scenery. For dinner we tried out the hotel's Orangery restaurant. It was pretty good - not oustanding, but better than most of the meals we've had in Spain. The hotel has a fine dining restaurant called the Dungeon Restaurant. It's in the barrel vaulted dungeons of the castle and is a pretty dramatic location. However, we had read some lukewarm reviews of the restaurant (which is also pretty expensive) and decided to skip it. We had our romantic "anniversary" dinner at The Secret Garden in Edinburgh the night before and could not have asked for a better meal. Something to keep in mind if you ever decide to head out to Dalhousie castle is that if you don't drive your own car, you're pretty much stuck at the castle for meals and activities. (Unless you want to pay for an expensive cab ride back into town). For us, it was fine as we had planned to use the time to relax - and we did!
Our second day at Dalhousie Castle we went falconing! Yep, falconing. The castle has a falconry center with a pretty impressive stock of birds. We flew falcons, kestrels and a variety of owls (they're also birds of prey). This is the castle's falconer, Julie. The woman is a walking encyclopedia on birds of prey. We were really impressed with her knowledge, her bird handling skills and her sense of humour. The woman is a kick in the pants!

Here are some shots of some of the falcons kicking it on their stands and waiting to work out their wings:

Here are a couple pictures of the birds in action - or as in action as we could manage to capture with our camera:

This little cutie was just a baby and not old enough yet to fly around. She just hopped on the table where we had our coffee break and climbed all over everyone.

I wish we could have captured photos of the little kestrel that Julie took out to show us their hunting techniques. This little bird flew so fast and swooped down from a really spectacular height to attack her "prey" (it was a little ball on a string - we didn't see the birds attack any live animals. Although, Julie said that once in a while the birds DO go after a rabbit hopping around the property in the middle of one of her demonstrations. She said a few people were traumatized by this at Easter.) I really enjoyed being so close to these birds and seeing what they're capable of. It was a great experience.

Later that afternoon, we hit the spa. Hubby got a massage that he said was great and I tried out all of the spa amenities - steam bath, hydropool, foot bath, etc. Then I sat in the solariumin - which looks out over the gorgeous castle grounds - in my fluffy white robe, drank herbal tea and read trashy British tabloids. A perfect end to the day! The spa is stylish and relaxing. I don't have any pictures though as I thought it might freak people out to have me snap them in the steam bath. We had another nice meal that night in the Orangery and headed out the next morning back to Edinburgh for another day and a half of sight seeing. I snapped a few photos of the inside of the castle before we left:

This is a picture of the little chapel inside the castle. There were three weddings in the 2 plus days that we stayed at the castle. They were all really pretty and because of the weddings we enjoyed bagpipe music every day were there. As an interesting side note, Julie told us that you can pay an extra fee and have one of the falcons deliver your wedding rings to the best man during the ceremony. That's a pretty original wedding memory!

I'll put up a post about our last day in Edinburgh and our final round of sight seeing later. Hope you're enjoying the pics!

Scotland

My hubby and I didn't really have a traditional wedding and - with all the lead up to the move to Spain - we didn't take a honeymoon either. (After all, we were moving to Madrid, we figured the whole stint here would be one long honeymoon.) But this year on our first anniversary, we decided to take the honeymoon we never had and visit Scotland for a long weekend. It was a GREAT idea!

We decided to stay in Edinburgh area since we were just there for a long weekend. (We're going to try to get to Glasgow, Isle of Skye and Inverness on another trip). Our first day in Scotland we stayed in Edinburgh itself. We arrived in the late afternoon, so there was just enough time to take a walk down the Royal Mile before getting ready for dinner at the Secret Garden - a decadent restaurant inside The Witchery which is an equally decadent hotel in Edinburgh. The Royal Mile is the stretch of High Street that starts at Edinburgh Castle and ends at Holyroodhouse Palace. For an anglophile like me - it was heaven!
I snapped a few pictures on High Street while we were out for our walk of cute pubs and such:

The pub "World's End" is great! We ate there our last day in Edinburgh and the food was delicious. The two photos of what looks like little alleys are basically alleys but they are called "closes" - a "close" is a "closed alley" - they're very narrow and date from the medievel era in Edinburgh. They were the primary way people accessed their homes then and they allowed the maximum density of buildings while also providing quick access through shortcuts between places (you didn't have to follow the main streets). The buildings were built several stories up (10 or more in some buildings) and the method of waste disposal was to throw your garbage (and sewage) out the window and into the street. You can imagine that the filth and garbage that collected in these narrow passes was pretty horendous. Edinburgh apparently had a lot of problems during that time with plague and disease due to their sewage "system". Look at that! I have a guidebook for Scotland too! Of course now Edinburgh is easily one of the cleanest cities I've ever visited.

Our second day in Edinburgh we headed up to Edinburgh Castle. The oldest part of the castle dates from the 12th century. This is my favorite of the different castles we've seen so far in Europe. It's rough, majestic and beautiful and, standing in the middle of all that green that you find in Scotland, it's also romantic. This is a shot of the castle from the Prince's Garden on the other side of the river Forth:

The rest of these photos were taken at the castle itself:

There was a wedding taking place at the little chapel in the castle while we were there. The exit of the couple from the church was accompanied by a bagpiper. We actually saw three or four wedding while we were in Scotland and they all had a bagpipe as part of the ceremony. It was awesome to be in the castle, hearing the bagpipe music:

This is a photo of the one o'clock gun. It's shot at one o'clock every day (can you guess where the name comes from?) and you can hear it from wherever you're at in Edinburgh. I guess it's pretty handy if you don't wear a watch:

Here are a couple of photos of Edinburgh that we took from the top of the castle:

That's the Nelson Monument in the background of the second photo. After touring the Castle we went for lunch at a local pub. I had the greatest fish and chips of my life and my hubby had Yorkshire pudding with a locally made pork/fennel sausage that was delicious. He also convinced me to split an appetizer of haggis balls and - as it turned out - I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed Haggis.

After lunch we took a walk down to the other end of the Royal Mile so I could finally get inside Holyroodhouse Palace. This was the site I was looking forward to visiting the most. It's the Queen's residence when she's in Scotland and was the location of a ton of dramatic events in Scottish history - most importantly - the events surrounding Mary, Queen of Scots. Alas, this is the closest I got to Holyroodhouse Palace:

Boo! Hiss! As it turns out, the Queen was in residence the day before we arrived in Edinburgh and Prince Andrew was still there for some event. For some reason they don't let the unwashed masses tour the palace when the Royals are in residence. It was kind of a let down - but it gives me a good excuse to plan a trip back to Edinburgh.
After a little window shopping we took a cab out to the countryside of Midlothian - about 10 or so miles from Edinburgh to our next destination - Dalhousie Castle - where we planned to stay for a couple of days. I'll post some photos of our stay at Dalhousie a little later!