Those lost days
May. 5th, 2024 04:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThe coherent - or at least consecutive - account of our April holiday broke off with a warning that we would now be offline for a few days, while we were at the Castle of Park. But I did make some notes during those days, and I did take some pictures, and now I have put them together. So this post belongs, if you are trying to keep track (and after all, if "you" are future-me, you might be) between those two.
Monday morning breakfast at the Nith Hotel gave us a view over the river, bright and breezy and sunny: but by the time we set off, the wind blew in squalls of icy rain, and despite a glimpse of rainbow we cancelled any ideas of spending the morning on a walking tour around Dumfries. So our plans didn't go beyond recharging the car.durham_rambler had identified a charger that looked promising, on the University campus, with a coffee shop nearby: but after we had driven twice around the campus, and admired the gardens, we were forced to admit defeat. The next charge point on the list was at an address I recognised from my study of the guide book as adjacent to Robert Burns' house, and turned out to be a large car park.
I had not initially planned to visit the Burns pilgrimage sites of Dumfries: I don't know why, except that Scotland offers you Robert Burns at every turning, and I had in mind to (and eventually did) accept that offer later. But I was very glad to have been guided by circumstance into the house where the poet spent whe last years of his life, a neat two-up, two-down with a tiny little cubby hole of a study between the upstairs rooms, where he had written some of his poems and engraved his name on the window pane with a diamond stylus (which had been given to him to enable the autographing of windows, because he was by now very much a celebrity). This room and three others were furnished as they would have been at the time, while the fourth room contained glass cases displaying items with an actual connection to Burns and his wife. Some of these were - well, grotesque: an inkwell made of a pony's hoof which had been given to Burns by some eminent admirer (he was clearly practiced at thanking them nicely); some were less personal than they might have been - a tumbler which Burns had used had been given by his widow to her son-in-law's father, who had had the plain glass engraved at great length with its glorious provenance; but - surprise, surprise - I liked the books (Burns' own copy of Montaigne, Jean Armour's copy of Hannah Glasse).
We liked the house so much, in fact, that we trotted off to see the mausoleum. Burns had been buried in the local churchyard, but as his fame grew a subscription had been raised to fund a more worthy memorial. In a churchyard of impressive red sandstone monuments, the white dome stands out (even if, as we did, you choose the wrong path to approach it, and don't see it at the end of a formal approach). Under the dome, a life-size marble statue stands between his muse and his plough.
Only the muse is original, the rest having been replaced in the 1930s, because, explained the docent, there had been so much criticism of anachronisms in the depiction of the clothing and the plough (the notice board offers the more pedestrian explanaton that the condition had deteriorated).
Dumfries also has one of those museums in which all sorts of interesting things are displayed in too little space, so that the giant lustre punchbowl is on the bottom shelf and obscured by less interesting (to me) things on the shelves above it. This is ungracious of me. I enjoyed a lot of it: dinosaur footprints! crystals displayed under changing light, to bring out the fluorescence! Women of Dumfries with the themes Art, Temperance, Suffrage! a video about protest and dissent in the 18th and 19th centuries featuring a choir singing settings of Chartist hymns (probably from this collection). And we skipped the museum's star attraction, the camera obscura, because by the time the staff decided that the wind had dropped enough to allow them to operate it, we were ready to move on.
The ability to display the camera obscura is a clue that the bright weather had returned, and lasted long enough for a sandwich lunch at a grden centre. But we drove west along the A75 lashed by torrential rain, and we very glad to reach the Castle of Park, and cups of tea and company (and stairs).
Tuesay's plan was to visit Stranraer, with a detour to the gardens of Castle Kennedy on the way, if the weather allowed. In fact the weather was glorious, and so were the gardens: it was peak rhododendron season, and they were dazzling. But I have chosen this picture:
Because the magnolia is also magnificent, and because you get a bonus hint of the castle - that ivy-covered hulk in the background, although this is not a typical view. From other sides it is a severe stone ruin, the same style as our own Castle of Park but on a larger scale. It is not open to visitors - and it is (noisily) infested by geese.
By the time we reached Stranraer, we were well into the afternoon. The wind blowing in from the harbour was icy, and demolition work was in noisy progress. Even so, I managed to get my warch battery replaced, checked out a couple of charity shops, admired the little square arounf the medieval tower house of Castle St John, bought provisions at the supermarket and left feeling generally kindly towards the place ...
The guide book promised black guillemots (tyskies) at Portpatrick. I have seen these before (in Westray? or maybe North Ronaldsay?) but in my mind they were just sitting there on a rock, as I remember them doing (and as they do in the illustrations).
In Portpatrick there were maybe five or six, zipping about the harbour: flying in, swimming around, diving, rearing up to shake out their wings. This isn't the greatest picture ever, but it's a photo of the thing that gave me the greatest pleasure. There's also a lighthouse (with a pottery, though the shop was closed) and an RNLI shop where I bought socks, marmalade, Christmas cards and a bag to carry them home: but the guillemots made my day.
We must have been to Portpatrick before, a long time ago, because we have walked the first two thirds of the Southern Upland Way, and this is where it starts. But we struggled to match the fragments of memory to what we could see, and eventually came to the conclusion that we had spent the first two nights one day's walk from the start, and taken a bus back to Portpatrick to start walking. Unless we spent the first night in Stranraer, and took the bus from there...
The Castle of Park is very close to Glenluce Abbey, so on the way home we diverted to view the abbey; luckily we already knew it was closed, so weren't disappointed to learn that we could only walk around the periphery, but couldn't go in. Like so many Historic Scotland properties, it has fallen foul of an inspection which identified a risk of falling masonry. Whoever installed the railings at Glenluce has been particularly zealous, closing off a generous margin around the ruins, as if the risk here were not simply of stones falling, but of their being hurled with great force.
The one really grey and rainy day of the trip was well-timed, since it was also the day I had most to do back at the Castle: last day, and I wanted to get ahead of the packing, plus it was my turn to cook. We did, though, visit The Museum in Newton Stewart. If you arrange museums along a spectrum from Beautifully Curated And Beautifully Displayed to A Whole Lot of Interesting Stuff, Newton Stewart is out at the latter end, and beyond: a former church full of everything you can imagine. A sign asks you not to take photographs without consulting the custodian, so I spent much of my visit playing Kim's Game: there's a Noah's Ark and a display about the life of James Clark Maxwell (which doesn't mention his demon) and traditional Ayrshire white embroidery and farm machinery and honours boards from local schools showing the 'dux' (pupil with the best marks) for each year and Panko, the suffragette themed card game (instructions not included) and a gas helmet for a baby (dislayed on a doll, its splayed legs emerging beneath the helmet like an infant dalek) and a section labelled 'Nature' containing mostlly traps and snares and a copy of A kitchen goes to war: a ration-time cookery book with 150 recipes contributed by famous people (including a lady announcer from the BBC - oh, and look, there's a copy in the Wellcome Collection) and ... Finally I consulted the custodian, who asked what I wanted to photograph, and said "Oh, that's fine, go ahead!"
So here's pretty party dress: it is displayed at eye level, and along the wall below its glass case is (what else?) a row of carpet sweepers and vacuum cleaners.
Goodbye to the Castle of Park. Time to visit Ayrshire...
Monday morning breakfast at the Nith Hotel gave us a view over the river, bright and breezy and sunny: but by the time we set off, the wind blew in squalls of icy rain, and despite a glimpse of rainbow we cancelled any ideas of spending the morning on a walking tour around Dumfries. So our plans didn't go beyond recharging the car.
durham_rambler had identified a charger that looked promising, on the University campus, with a coffee shop nearby: but after we had driven twice around the campus, and admired the gardens, we were forced to admit defeat. The next charge point on the list was at an address I recognised from my study of the guide book as adjacent to Robert Burns' house, and turned out to be a large car park.I had not initially planned to visit the Burns pilgrimage sites of Dumfries: I don't know why, except that Scotland offers you Robert Burns at every turning, and I had in mind to (and eventually did) accept that offer later. But I was very glad to have been guided by circumstance into the house where the poet spent whe last years of his life, a neat two-up, two-down with a tiny little cubby hole of a study between the upstairs rooms, where he had written some of his poems and engraved his name on the window pane with a diamond stylus (which had been given to him to enable the autographing of windows, because he was by now very much a celebrity). This room and three others were furnished as they would have been at the time, while the fourth room contained glass cases displaying items with an actual connection to Burns and his wife. Some of these were - well, grotesque: an inkwell made of a pony's hoof which had been given to Burns by some eminent admirer (he was clearly practiced at thanking them nicely); some were less personal than they might have been - a tumbler which Burns had used had been given by his widow to her son-in-law's father, who had had the plain glass engraved at great length with its glorious provenance; but - surprise, surprise - I liked the books (Burns' own copy of Montaigne, Jean Armour's copy of Hannah Glasse).
We liked the house so much, in fact, that we trotted off to see the mausoleum. Burns had been buried in the local churchyard, but as his fame grew a subscription had been raised to fund a more worthy memorial. In a churchyard of impressive red sandstone monuments, the white dome stands out (even if, as we did, you choose the wrong path to approach it, and don't see it at the end of a formal approach). Under the dome, a life-size marble statue stands between his muse and his plough.
Only the muse is original, the rest having been replaced in the 1930s, because, explained the docent, there had been so much criticism of anachronisms in the depiction of the clothing and the plough (the notice board offers the more pedestrian explanaton that the condition had deteriorated).
Dumfries also has one of those museums in which all sorts of interesting things are displayed in too little space, so that the giant lustre punchbowl is on the bottom shelf and obscured by less interesting (to me) things on the shelves above it. This is ungracious of me. I enjoyed a lot of it: dinosaur footprints! crystals displayed under changing light, to bring out the fluorescence! Women of Dumfries with the themes Art, Temperance, Suffrage! a video about protest and dissent in the 18th and 19th centuries featuring a choir singing settings of Chartist hymns (probably from this collection). And we skipped the museum's star attraction, the camera obscura, because by the time the staff decided that the wind had dropped enough to allow them to operate it, we were ready to move on.
The ability to display the camera obscura is a clue that the bright weather had returned, and lasted long enough for a sandwich lunch at a grden centre. But we drove west along the A75 lashed by torrential rain, and we very glad to reach the Castle of Park, and cups of tea and company (and stairs).
Tuesay's plan was to visit Stranraer, with a detour to the gardens of Castle Kennedy on the way, if the weather allowed. In fact the weather was glorious, and so were the gardens: it was peak rhododendron season, and they were dazzling. But I have chosen this picture:
Because the magnolia is also magnificent, and because you get a bonus hint of the castle - that ivy-covered hulk in the background, although this is not a typical view. From other sides it is a severe stone ruin, the same style as our own Castle of Park but on a larger scale. It is not open to visitors - and it is (noisily) infested by geese.
By the time we reached Stranraer, we were well into the afternoon. The wind blowing in from the harbour was icy, and demolition work was in noisy progress. Even so, I managed to get my warch battery replaced, checked out a couple of charity shops, admired the little square arounf the medieval tower house of Castle St John, bought provisions at the supermarket and left feeling generally kindly towards the place ...
The guide book promised black guillemots (tyskies) at Portpatrick. I have seen these before (in Westray? or maybe North Ronaldsay?) but in my mind they were just sitting there on a rock, as I remember them doing (and as they do in the illustrations).
In Portpatrick there were maybe five or six, zipping about the harbour: flying in, swimming around, diving, rearing up to shake out their wings. This isn't the greatest picture ever, but it's a photo of the thing that gave me the greatest pleasure. There's also a lighthouse (with a pottery, though the shop was closed) and an RNLI shop where I bought socks, marmalade, Christmas cards and a bag to carry them home: but the guillemots made my day.
We must have been to Portpatrick before, a long time ago, because we have walked the first two thirds of the Southern Upland Way, and this is where it starts. But we struggled to match the fragments of memory to what we could see, and eventually came to the conclusion that we had spent the first two nights one day's walk from the start, and taken a bus back to Portpatrick to start walking. Unless we spent the first night in Stranraer, and took the bus from there...
The Castle of Park is very close to Glenluce Abbey, so on the way home we diverted to view the abbey; luckily we already knew it was closed, so weren't disappointed to learn that we could only walk around the periphery, but couldn't go in. Like so many Historic Scotland properties, it has fallen foul of an inspection which identified a risk of falling masonry. Whoever installed the railings at Glenluce has been particularly zealous, closing off a generous margin around the ruins, as if the risk here were not simply of stones falling, but of their being hurled with great force.
The one really grey and rainy day of the trip was well-timed, since it was also the day I had most to do back at the Castle: last day, and I wanted to get ahead of the packing, plus it was my turn to cook. We did, though, visit The Museum in Newton Stewart. If you arrange museums along a spectrum from Beautifully Curated And Beautifully Displayed to A Whole Lot of Interesting Stuff, Newton Stewart is out at the latter end, and beyond: a former church full of everything you can imagine. A sign asks you not to take photographs without consulting the custodian, so I spent much of my visit playing Kim's Game: there's a Noah's Ark and a display about the life of James Clark Maxwell (which doesn't mention his demon) and traditional Ayrshire white embroidery and farm machinery and honours boards from local schools showing the 'dux' (pupil with the best marks) for each year and Panko, the suffragette themed card game (instructions not included) and a gas helmet for a baby (dislayed on a doll, its splayed legs emerging beneath the helmet like an infant dalek) and a section labelled 'Nature' containing mostlly traps and snares and a copy of A kitchen goes to war: a ration-time cookery book with 150 recipes contributed by famous people (including a lady announcer from the BBC - oh, and look, there's a copy in the Wellcome Collection) and ... Finally I consulted the custodian, who asked what I wanted to photograph, and said "Oh, that's fine, go ahead!"
So here's pretty party dress: it is displayed at eye level, and along the wall below its glass case is (what else?) a row of carpet sweepers and vacuum cleaners.
Goodbye to the Castle of Park. Time to visit Ayrshire...
