News from Nowhere

Our last stop in Cumbria this morning was a visit to an old friend who lives just outside Carlisle, and whom we do not see anything like often enough, considering how close to home that is (there are reasons, but even so). We had asked for coffee, and she gave us coffee and croissants and conversation; perhaps not the several years worth of conversation we are due, but enough to make us hopeful for more in future.

Then we set the satnav for Caerlaverock Castle. We had been there before, long ago, and had tried to return on our way home from Kirkcudbright last summer, but were thwarted by the impossibility of navigating round Dumfries (all the roads were closed for a cycle race, and after trying three different routes, we gave up and went to Annan instead). Perhaps we would be luckier...

We crossed the border into Scotland without incident, on the M6. Once we were off the motorway, though, the satnav started playing its tricks again. It directed us down a single track road, all ruts and puddles, until durham_rambler stopped at a road junction, and declared that he wasn't going to follow instructions, he was going to head towards that road over there, on which he could see traffic. Clearly, something is haywire in the satnav settings, but we haven't yet discovered what: it is set to choose the eco-friendly route over the fastest route (the only two options) and to avoid unmade roads. But it seems to have a sneaky preference for taking us to a location of tourist interest which we didn't know we wanted: first Hardknott Pass and then, today, the road junction at which durham_rambler put his foot down was right outside Ruthwell Church.

So before we continued on more sensible roads, we collected the key, and went into the church to have a look at the Ruthwell Cross:



because I do love a bit of eighth century detail. The runes at either side are Anglo-Saxon, and have been deciphered as a passage of The Dream of the Rood, which is apt.

Then on to Caerlaverock:



Like so many Historic Scotland properties, it is suffering from areas being closed off because Historic Scotland have been scrutinising the masonry and decided that it is very old, and bits may fall off. They also have a schedule of repairs, but this seems to start with training lots of stonemasons - a Good Thing, but a slow process. Despite which, we spent a happy hour poking around. Inside that fortified triangle, a subsequent owner inserted an extraordinary Renaissance frontage: you enter through the stone tunnel of the gatehouse and are confronted by a wall of windows, all in the same red sandstone, towering up above you. Impossible to photograph, though I tried. It was almost warm enough to sit for a while in the shelter of the ruined hall, and think that nmaybe it really is spring, because the swallows have returned.

The rain didn't start until we were at our hotel.

Tomorrow we join D. and valydiarosada and J. at the Castle of Park, which, being a Landmark, does not have wifi: so there will be a break in transmission.

We will not be eating haggis tonight, Burns Night though it is. It's not for want of trying. Ocado had no haggis when I placed my last order; or rather, they offered only vegetarian haggis, and at the time I thought I could do better.

Yesterday morning we went into Durham. I had some errands to do at the market, and I thought that buying a haggis would be one of them. The cheese stall (in former times my usual supplier, but now under different management) could not help, and the butcher's stall has vanished completely. Luckily the watch stall was able to refit the pin that secures my watch strap, so the trip wasn't wasted. But neither the supermarket nor the fancy new deli could help me. So there will be smoked mackerel kedgeree for dinner, and very nice too.

And here's a picture from last summer's holiday in Galloway, from Annan's old harbour area:

The most obvious route from Isle of Whithorn to Kirkcudbright runs through Wigtown, which is Scotland's book town: of course we sopped there. We had actually planned a couple of nights in Wigtown, but been forced by circumstances into something that worked even better. We did not go into every bookshop in town, but we spent a happy day walking up one side of Main Street and down the other, and came away with as much as we could comfortably carry...

Here's durham_rambler, ready to start:



( More under the cut: )

And that was Wigtown.

After two days in Kirkcudbright, I have not exhausted the town, though it has exhausted me, more than once. I'll get to that in due course, I hope.

On Monday morning we all departed from the Old Place of Monreith to go our several ways: which was 'homeward' for everyone but durham_rambler and me. We started the next phase of our holiday by heading for Whithorn. Iona is more famous, but Whithorn does seem to be the first place in Scotland where Christianity was established: The death and burial here of St Ninian are traditionally dated to the year 431; he gets a mention in Bede's History of the church (731), for his white church at Whithorn, his Candida Casa. The priory ruins are twelfth century, but we wanted to see them, the town that grew up about that pilgrimage centre, and the exhibition about it. That was the plan.

We arrived before the Visitor Centre opened, but no problem, it was a fine bright morning, we'd have a stroll aound, through the Pend, the archway which leads to the Priory. Down the lane we found the custodian of a small Historic Environment Scotland museum explaining to a group of would-be visitors that access to her collection was included in the Visitor Centre ticket, and they would be able to visit once they had bought their tickets. Smugly, we produced our English Heritage cards, and she let us in. It's a small but beautifully displayed collection of carved stones. This cross is not typical (it's taller, and made of sandstone):



But it's the Monreith Cross, so, y'know... The custodian was very helpful, and wanted to tell us all about everything; perhaps a little too helpful, as it was hard to focus on what we were seeing. But she did get us onto the guided tour of the roundhouse, when we had left it too late to go back and buy tickets and still catch the 11.30 tour - she vouched for us that we would definitely pay up (and we did).

We hadn't planned to join the guided tour, but then, we hadn't known there was a roundhouse which we couldn't see any other way. And I'm usually a bit suspicious of the 'guided tour of our reconstruction' so I don't know what impulse made us say yes. But I'm very glad we did:



It is, if I've got this right, a reconstruction of a particularly splendid and well-preserved roundhouse excavated not far away, and built adjacent to land on which there were other, not as good, roundhouses. The guide / lecturer was our second fluent speaker of the morning, and he was first rate. Two things particularly stick in my memory, the first a general fact about roundhouses: you don't need to leave a hole for the chimney in a thatched roof, if you make the thatch at the apex thinner the smoke will still get out but the rain won't get in. The second is site specific: there was precisely one piece of iron found in the roundhouse, a plough blade which had been buried under the hearth.

After all this excitement, maybe it was inevitable the afternoon would be a bit flat. There was nothing wrong with the exhibition at the visitor centre (if you aren't bothered by coming across a skull dramatically displayed in the middle of it, and I'm not, really) but mostly it told us at some length things we already knew. Oh, there was one interesting thing - apparently Richard III had a particular devotion to Saint Ninian (link saved for my own reference, since I haven't read it yet). So we spent less time here than we might have done, and set off again down the lane to the priory ruins. Which were closed. When we visited Jedburgh, in June, we were frustrated to discover that the abbey itself was closed for repairs to the masonry; so was Whithorn. Historic Scotland appear to have been poking around their ruined buildings (spoiler alert: the castle here in Kirkcudbright is also closed) and discovering that well, ruins are liable to be a bit ruinous. I'm happy for them to do repairs, but there was no sign of masons actually at work.

We weren't quite ready to head for our night's B&B, so we headed for the coast, and stopped at Garlieston, which claims to be the home of the wartime Mulberry harbour, but which is also a very pretty village which supplied us with a very welcome pot of Early Grey.

ETA: Monday was a Bank Holiday in Scotland (though not in England). I don't know why, except that the Scots seem to observe summer earlier than the English do. We had not known whether to expect any disruption too our plans, but in fact it passed so unobtrusively that I had completely forgotten about it.

We spent most of today book shopping in Wigtown, and have now reached the final stop on our travels, the Selkirk Arms In Kirkudbright. But first...

Our first outing from the Old Place of Monrieth was to the Mull of Galloway. Once we thought of it, it seemed the obvious place to go: here we were in the south of the country, so why not go all the way? Look at a map; we were near the Solway Coast, and if you follow that coast along, until it clears the Firth, the last spit dangling down at the end is the Mull of Galloway, and it has a lighthouse on it - better still, a Stevenson lighthouse. This is slightly to the south of Durham, and considerably to the west.



There's a café, with a magnificent view, where we ate Ecclefechan tart (imagine preparing the fruit for a Christmas pudding but then baking it in a pastry case. Ecclefechan is also famous as the birthplace of Thomas Carlyle: these two things seem to me well balanced). There's a short walk to the lighthouse, and the heather is coming into bloom. There's a small exhibition with the sort of things they exhibit at lighthouses: a Fresnel lens, and a video about local shipwrecks, and an explanation of how to interpret semaphore, and - impressive if a bit baffling - an entire room housing the mechanism to power the foghorn (and several huge tanks outs=ide to hold the compressed air): it may be primarily a visual signal, but it's the audio warning that takes all the engineering.

On our way home, we followed signs to the Kirkmadrine stones, expecting to find sone standing stones we could admire briefly (we were runnung late, and it was my turn to cook). They brought us, in the middle of nowhere - of farmland, in fact - to a pair of gateposts and a track through woodland, which sloped up to a little nineteenth century church. The west end was a single glass display case, housing a collection of sixth century Christian carved gravestones: wonderful, and entirely unexpected.

We have now visited Scotland's most southerly point. The most northerly point is off Unst, in Shetland, and we have gone to the nature reserve at the north of the island and looked at it. Most westerly is Rockall, or if you want somewhere inhabited(ish), Saint Kilda: I won't be visiting either of those. But it is possible to visit the furthest east: Sheland's Out Skerries.