Itinerary
A
= London – Friday, 21 March
B
= Battle – Saturday, 22 March
C
= ASDA/Wal-Mart – Saturday, 22 March
D
= Glastonbury – Saturday-Sunday, 22-23 March
E
= Ludlow – Monday, 24 March
H1
= Shrewsbury – Monday-Tuesday, 24-25 March
G
= Oswestry and Offa’s Dyke – Tuesday, 25 March
I
= Durham – Wednesday, 26 March
J
= Hadrian’s Wall – Thursday, 27 March
K
= Holy Island of Lindisfarne – Thursday, 27 March
L
= Edinburgh – Friday, 28 March
M
= Kinross – Friday, 28 March
N
= Dunkeld – Saturday, 29 March
O
= Drumnadrochit on Loch Ness – Saturday, 29 March
P
= Fort William – Sunday, 30 March
Q
= Paisley-Glasgow – Sunday, 30 March
* * *
Thursday,
20 March
Our
big trip begins! We got up pretty much per usual, and dropped
Tristan off at school.2
Anne embarrassed him a bit by making him kiss her goodbye. We won’t
see him for almost two weeks. Then Anne and I drove from Natchitoches to Houston, only
stopping a couple times – at the McDonald’s in Many and then at
the Jack in the Box in Splendora, Texas (about halfway from Lufkin to
Houston). We arrived at the George Bush International Airport about
1 pm. We left our car at Fast Park (for which we had a coupon for a
really good price for long term parking) and were bussed to the
terminal. We breezed through airport security almost scandalously
easily, then had a long wait. I started reading Jack Whyte’s The
Skystone,
the first in a nine volume series, The
Camulod Chronicles,
setting the Arthurian stories against a realistic background …
starting on Hadrian’s Wall (see Thursday below).3
We
boarded the plane, a British Airways 777, just before 5 pm, were
moving by the posted 5:05, and were off the ground by 5:30. We sat
toward the back, on the right side, the two seats nearest the window,
but there were over a hundred empty seats on the plane so there was
plenty of room to spread out. The in-flight entertainment screen
included a “GPS channel” constantly showing our position, air
speed, ETA, etc. By 6:35 we were about over Atlanta when we had our
first round of refreshments. I got red wine, Anne got two tiny cans
of Diet Coke. This was shortly followed by dinner, which was pretty
good – a chicken and rice pilaf dish, salad, and roll, with a pack
of cookies and a candy in addition to a piece of cheese cake. By
6:50 it was getting dark outside. About 7:50 the captain, Adrian
Potter, pointed out New York City on the left (we were on the right
side of the plane). For this overnight flight British Airways
provided a pillow and a blanket, and a packet with socks, a sleep
mask, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a headset for the
entertainment screen. I slept from about 9 pm to a bit past
midnight, and woke up when we were approaching Ireland with about an
hour and a half left to London. Anne had watched a movie and taken a
nap as well. They served us a simple breakfast not too long after
that – a deli box with a ham and cheese sandwich, orange juice, and
strawberry yogurt. We left off the ham since it was Good Friday.
Friday,
21 March – Good Friday
We
landed at Gatwick Airport south of London just before 7 am local time
(2 am Houston time). We were herded into a huge area – Passport
Control – where the line was reminiscent of Disney. It moved
pretty quickly, however, and we were through it in about a half hour.
I think I overwhelmed the immigration lady when I started the litany
of places we intended to visit! We dropped our bags at “Left
Luggage” and were on the Gatwick Express train to Victoria Station
by about 9 am. It was a half hour trip.
We
then took the Underground or “Tube” to King’s Cross Station,
where we found Platform 9¾ of Harry Potter fame. The
baggage trolley seemed to be stuck halfway through and I could not
get to the Hogwarts Express, though! There was a small crowd of
other folks there taking pictures as well. We took the Tube back to
Victoria Station. Outside, we found the red Original Tour
double-decker bus and took the Red Line around ultimately to the
Tower of London. We sat up top for the best view. It was quite cold
and windy although at this point it was sunny. We crossed the Thames
River a couple of times, including via the London Bridge.
Along the way we passed such landmarks as Trafalgar Square, Big
Ben, the London Eye, and St. Paul’s Cathedral before crossing
the Tower Bridge from the south.
At
the Tower of London, we got off the bus and began one of the
Yeoman Warders’ Tours but realized that was going to take longer
than we wanted to spend, so we left it.
We took a brief look through
one of the several gift shops on the Tower grounds, then went into
the White Tower, the oldest part of the castle, completed by
the end of the reign of William the Conqueror in 1087. At the time
it was the tallest structure in London, the tower being the keep of
the castle symbolizing his domination of England. Unfortunately, the
exhibits inside mainly preserve its very late post-medieval character
as an armory so was of less interest to me than I had hoped. In a
second gift shop there we bought a couple of gee-gaws, then went out
to the thirteenth-century “Medieval Palace” of Kings Henry III
and Edward I. That was more interesting. But it was starting to
rain as we emerged up top along the outer curtain wall, so we went
back down to the first gift shop where I bought a £10 umbrella with
the British flag around its edge – whereupon the rain stopped.
We
left the Tower then, walked around to a restaurant on the grounds
where we got £5-each fish and chips.4
About 3:30 we were headed toward resuming the bus tour. On the way
back to where we started at Victoria Station, we saw the Houses of
Parliament, Westminster Cathedral and Buckingham Palace – all from
the outside, of course.
We
took the Gatwick Express back to the airport, another half-hour ride.
This time we sat across from a nice couple up from the Channel
Islands (he reminded both of us of Anne’s brother-in-law Darrell).
We retrieved our luggage and bought tickets for the hotel bus, caught
it a few minutes after 6 pm, and were in our hotel room at the
Travelodge-Gatwick by about 6:40. It was nothing fancy. Actually,
Anne has some choice things to say about it. Some aspects, it turns
out, must be just the British, maybe European, way – no sheet
except for the fitted sheet over the mattress, with a comforter
thrown over; no such thing as “washcloths” – but there was a
general grunginess made worse by only one tiny soap for the room, as
well as the bulbs in the bathroom were so loose that we thought they
were out until I had trudged down to the lobby, had them scrounge me
up some bulbs, and went to change them. Given the dinginess of the
comforter, I slept under an extra towel, and Anne slept under our two
coats. Nevertheless, we were very tired, and we slept pretty well.
Saturday,
22 March
We
were up early, finding a cold, rainy day. We had picked up a muffin
at the airport last night, so we made some tea – this being
England, every
place has
the makings for tea! – and shared the muffin. We checked out of
the hotel – luckily they did not ask how our stay was, because Anne
was prepared to let them have it. We caught the bus back to the
South Terminal of Gatwick Airport from where we called our car rental
company, 1car1, just before 8 am. A really amiable chap picked us up
in a van and took us to get our car, a dark grey Vauxhall
Astra. At
Anne’s urging I asked about upgrading to an automatic, and they did
it for free! We headed out a bit hesitantly, but frankly driving on
the left side of the road proved a lot less daunting than I had
feared.5
We needed gas, and foolishly did not ask for the nearest petrol
station. I just programmed the GPS and we hit the road. Somehow we
ended up going the wrong direction anyway, all the way to
Leatherhead, southwest of London, but there we did manage to find a
Texaco station – it was over $100, the equivalent of about $8.50 a
gallon!6
We got back on the road and amazingly made it to Battle without
incident, driving all across the southeastern English countryside.
It was only later that we realized why we had gone so far off course
earlier – I had on Friday reset the “home” position on the
TomTom to the center of London in an attempt to get it oriented when
it seemed to be having trouble even finding any satellites, and for
some reason it would occasionally get confused and recalculate a
course “home.” When we realized what was happening … well,
I’ll get to that…. On this trip to Battle, Anne started what was
going to be her refrain through the whole trip – “Sheep!”
Anyway,
we made it to Battle. Driving was itself amazingly easy; Anne was a
great navigator, keeping track of the GPS and interpreting what it
was telling me to do. There are really things I like about the
British road system – the roundabouts are not bad at all
(especially when the GPS is telling you, “Turn left at the rotary;
take the first exit”), and I really liked the frequent “laybys,”
clearly marked in advance by “P” as places to pull off the road
and park. And, for all its annoying habit of trying to go back
“home,” the GPS was good about warning me that I was exceeding
the speed limit or that a traffic camera was coming up.
At
Battle we experienced the first of many instances of just not enough
time to see everything. We would have liked to wander the town, but
had time only for Battle Abbey itself, the site of the Battle of
Hastings, 14 October 1066. Wow! Hastings is actually a port on the
English Channel about seven miles due south. Battle is where the
armies of Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, and
the invading Duke William of Normandy, met on that Saturday over nine
hundred years ago – the last time an invading army has won a
victory in England, making Duke William King William the Conqueror.
We took the long walk around the battlefield – through intermittent
sleet interspersed with rain and sunshine. Overall, our waterproof
jackets proved their worth! Frequent plaques allowed us to trace the
events of the battle. We ended the tour of the battlefield at
the remains of the abbey built by William on the site of Harold’s
death.
Like
most of the hundreds of magnificent monasteries that dotted the
medieval English landscape, all that remains of Battle Abbey
are ruins. In the aftermath of his break with the Pope in the early
1500s, King Henry VIII ordered the monasteries stripped and closed,
for two reasons. The monks had sided with the Pope. And the
monasteries were very rich. Henry used that wealth to reward the
nobles who supported him. Abandoned, no longer maintained, the
buildings decayed into ruins. Most, anyway – parts might be
converted into noblemen’s palaces, such as part of Battle Abbey,
which now hosts a boarding school.
 |
| The image on my shirt |
After
climbing all around the ruins, we ate lunch in the café on the
grounds. It was very good; we were really hungry. We shared a pasta
salad, a roast beef sandwich and chips – er, crisps – a
delicious bowl of wild mushroom soup, a couple big slices of homemade
brown bread, and a slice of lemon drizzle cake. Then we went through
the gift shop there – typically at these gift shops we would pick
up some kind of souvenirs in addition to post cards for the little
post card book Anne was assembling, and also some kind of
commemorative guide book. Here Anne got me a tee shirt showing a
scene from the Bayeux Tapestry, a medieval embroidery telling
the story of the Battle of Hastings – the Tapestry is not here at
Battle, but rather in Bayeux in France.
We
got back on the road sometime near our planned time and headed back
toward an ASDA (“part of the Wal-Mart family”) on the
southwestern outskirts of London … we thought. Here is
where we first realized the GPS was leading us astray, toward the
center of London – as we passed through increasingly heavy urban
traffic – not the kind of driving I wanted to be doing my
first day! Well, we did eventually realize what was happening (deep
in southern London), and how the TomTom was warning us something was
wrong, by yelping “Toll charge” before recalculating a
course for the center of London. I showed Anne how to reset it for
the proper destination whenever that happened, and we eventually
found the ASDA, about two hours later than I had planned. That
was a bit of an experience – Anne called it a “nightmare.” It
was very crowded and chaotic; there did not seem to be any real
organizational scheme, but we finally found almost everything we were
looking for. We picked up various things – a soft ice chest,
drinks, snacks, as well as a couple of duvets, the nearest thing we
could find to sheets. We called our first B&B hostess, Daphne,
as we were leaving there, about 6 pm – apparently she had never
really believed we could do what I said and be to Glastonbury when I
planned. In fact, once we arrived, she was surprised we had made it
that quickly.
Anyway,
we drove westward across southern England from London to Glastonbury
through the dark, not seeing any scenery, stopping for petrol and
getting a quick bite at a KFC.7
We did take a couple of wrong turns, just not recognizing the roads
that TomTom was telling us to take in time to make the turns in the
dark, but as long as it kept the right destination in mind it was
great about recalculating a new course to that destination on the
fly. We ended up at the Pippin Bread and Breakfast in Glastonbury
right at 9 pm. There was one other guest (who was taking up all the
driveway so we had to park on the street), but we never saw him this
evening. We went to bed pretty quickly.
Sunday,
23 March – Easter
It
was snowing like crazy for the first few minutes after we got up –
big flakes – but it was not sticking. It remained cold all day,
however, even though we had sun for a while and rain at times. We
had breakfast at 8:30 along with the other guest – a
“psychoanalyst” (well, psycho-something) Barry, and also
the hostess Daphne’s husband Tony (Anne’s
assessment: “a perfect English gentleman”) – and her dog, Zoe,
a big brown Labrador retriever. It was a very good “English”
breakfast – cereal, fruit, fried eggs, “bacon” (more like ham),
mushy sausages, mushrooms, fried toast, and fried tomato, followed by
regular toast (from bread Daphne had made) and jam. Zoe ended up
getting into the toast at the end – “Naughty Zoe,” admonished
Tony. Barry left while we were finishing breakfast … I commented
to Tony, “I guess y’all see all kinds, huh?” Barry was a sight
– a mop of long black hair covering his eyes like a sheep-dog’s,
he looked something like a ‘60s rock star, sporting loose tie-died
clothes that looked more like pajamas. Knowing Glastonbury has
become something of a New Age Mecca in England, I figure he was not
the first such guest Pippin B&B had seen.
Anyway,
Anne and I headed off to Mass at St. Mary of Glastonbury Catholic
Church, which the website had said was at 10 am – turns out it was
at 10:30 instead, so we walked around downtown Glastonbury a bit. We
stopped in a newsstand, walked on past a spire-like structure at what
seemed to be the town square, a bit back up High Street. (Just about
all these old English towns had a “High Street.”) Mass was nice.
We were out about 11:45.
We
then walked across to Glastonbury Abbey – Wow! According to
legend, St. Joseph of Arimathea, the uncle of the Virgin Mary, was a
tin and metals merchant who ranged as far as southern Britain in
search of metals. On one trip he supposedly brought his grandnephew
Jesus with him – and together they built a place of worship right
there, of mud and straw, called the “Wattle Church” – where the
abbey church would later be built. Long revered as the birthplace of
Christianity in England, Glastonbury would be one of the largest and
richest monasteries until the Reformation. A guide in
sixteenth-century period dress, supposedly that of the nobleman set
by Henry VIII to dissolve the monastery, told us the whole story
including that of the Glastonbury Thorn, a shoot of which was there
on the abbey grounds, the main tree itself being within sight on
“Wearyall Hill” – because that is where St. Joseph supposedly
stuck his staff in the ground and proclaimed, “We are weary all!”
“But they would not have been speaking English now, would they?”
commented the wise guide.
We
left the Abbey in time to catch a 2 pm bus the mile or so to the base
of Glastonbury Tor, a big steep hill that juts up from the
relatively flat landscape north of Glastonbury, surmounted by the
remains of a church. We made the long climb up the north side away
from town, took in the view, then made the long climb down the other
side back toward town. On the way down, Anne got to take some close
shots of some sheep. I tried to get them to come to her by chanting
“Baa-Ram-Ewe!” It worked in the movie Babe.
At
the base of the downward climb from the Tor we went into the Chalice
Well and Gardens – where St. Joseph of Arimathea supposedly
buried the Holy Grail when he came back to Britain after the
Crucifixion. Thus the waters that spring up there are said to have
curative powers. We spent about an hour in the gardens. We bought a
bottle and collected some of the healing waters; Anne dipped her
wrist in the water; I put my left hand in and hoped it would migrate
up to my left shoulder that has been bothering me.
The
girl selling entrance to the Chalice Well had indicated a good place
to get food would be the Rifleman’s Arms Pub not too far away from
the Well, but we walked back into town to the Abbey Gift Shop before
it closed at 5 pm and I got a souvenir guide book as well as a small
bottle of Glastonbury Mead. We also went around to Burns the Bread
bakery on High Street (suggested by Rick Steves) and got several
treats for later (shortbread, gingerbread, meringue muffins, and a
“chocolate devil”), then moved our car from where we had parked
it in front of the Church to the Pub. We had a really good meal
there – I had beef stew, Anne had macaroni and cheese; I had an ale
– Skinner’s Cornish Knocker. There were a lot of locals at this
pub too – engaged in a rather messy-looking “Easter Egg Roll”
that seemed more to consist of smashing the eggs on each other’s
heads.
After
supper, we then drove to Wells, only a few miles north of Glastonbury
(but along a road barely wider than our car for part of the
distance). We parked and walked a few blocks to Wells Cathedral
– a nice local lady walking her dog helped us find it. The
cathedral was closed, so we walked all around the outside, down to
the Bishop’s Close (a medieval street) then made our way back to
the car – where I realized I had parked in a Paid Parking lot
without realizing it. I went ahead and dropped a pound or so in the
slot, but worried all the way back to Glastonbury that I may have
been ticketed.
We
made it back to Pippin B&B about sunset, 6:45 or so. Daphne said
that if I did not have a paper ticket on the car, they had not gotten
me. She let us use her washer and drier to do a little laundry –
our jeans had gotten muddy around the legs at Battle. Anne made tea
and we had some of the pastries. We also visited with a new
overnight guest, a young man from the Czech Republic who works in
Leeds but is touring England during his breaks – Jiri (pronounced
“Yeary,” means “George”). Later, Anne and I watched a TV
show on BBC1 that “Tony likes” – The No. 1 Ladies’
Detective Agency. We turned our lights out about 11 pm.
Monday,
24 March
We
were up and packed before the 8:30 breakfast, pretty much a repeat of
yesterday’s (except that Jiri had had a cold breakfast much earlier
and left to catch a 7 am bus). Once again it was with Daphne, Tony,
and Zoe. We had another nice visit with them. Yesterday they had
been very interested in the small photo album we brought from home;
today we talked more about Tristan and his interests – mostly
sports. We also found out that Tony is 93 years old … and that he
and Daphne have only been married three years! We were out of there
by 9:20-ish.
We
drove basically north, across the Severn Estuary Bridge, through
southern Wales for some distance, through Monmouth and Hereford, to
Ludlow. We stopped in briefly at another ASDA in Hereford, looking
for Anne some gloves to replace one she lost at the Tower of London,
not finding that but getting a couple other things, including some
ibuprofen for her hand which continued to hurt her through the entire
week. It was cloudy leaving Glastonbury, then there were periods of
sun, but it was cloudy with intermittent rain at Ludlow (and after).
In
Ludlow, we parked quite a way from the Castle at a Tesco supermarket
and walked about half a mile through town to the Castle, going
through the market in front of the Castle (where we found Anne
some gloves). Ludlow Castle is great – all ruins. It also
may have some family significance to me, through my maternal
grandmother’s family, the Ludlows. Probably not, but for today I
pretended so! We went all through it, including up in and on a
couple of towers.
But we were running late all day, which really
worried me for Thursday when we would be on a really tight schedule
due to the tidal causeway to Holy Island. We spent only a bit more
than an hour at Ludlow Castle, then walked back to our car and went
through the Tesco for just a few minutes, exploring another example
of a UK supermarket.
We
left Ludlow about 3:30. Again, there was intermittent rain and sun
to Shrewsbury, which we reached about 4:20-ish. We made our way to
Trevellion House, where the hostess Sonia Tappin was out but her
teenaged son Ben let us in and showed us to our room. The room here
was very nice but very small, a bit too crowded with furniture,
including a wardrobe that looks like it could include all of
Narnia.
After
dropping our bags and having a snack of pastry from Glastonbury, Anne
and I headed into Shrewsbury, parking just across the street from
Shrewsbury Abbey – Brother Cadfael’s church (yes, I know
he’s fictional, but …). Anne and I walked across the English
Bridge into town, up Wyle Cop, Fish Street – all these names go
back to the twelfth century at least and I am familiar with them from
the Brother Cadfael mystery novels by Ellis Peters, a native
of Shrewsbury, set in that 12th century abbey, the town of
Shrewsbury, and the surrounding countryside.
Not only are the street
names medieval – they are narrow, windy, cobbled.
Shrewsbury may preserve more of its medieval character than anyplace
else we saw on this trip with the exception of Durham. I was very
excited – Anne complained that I kept just taking off walking and
leaving her behind. 
We made our way to the remains of the old St.
Chad’s Church, possibly the first church in town at the site of
the original Anglo-Saxon settlement at Scrobbigsbyrig – all
that remains is the Lady Chapel, the rest having collapsed in the
seventeenth or eighteenth century, whereupon the “new” St. Chad’s
was built a few streets over. But then we had our first real
disappointment of the trip – we were set on getting some “real”
pub fish and chips (not the quasi-fast-food kind we got outside the
Tower of London) but we found that all the pubs were out of food –
Easter Monday being a Bank Holiday, they had seen really heavy
traffic earlier in the day. Each one suggested another down the
street but it was the same story everywhere, until we finally gave
up, went back to the car (it was sleeting on us a little bit at this
point) and started trying to find some place outside of town. We
ended up making a really bad assumption – that you cannot go wrong
with Chinese … Dragon King Chinese Restaurant in Shrewsbury is to
be avoided at all costs!
We
were back at Trevellion House about 7:30 or so, where I introduced
myself to Sonia our hostess. We retired to our room, watched a bit
more British TV, then called it a night.
By
the way, one of the complaints about the Travelodge had been that
there was no sheet – just a fitted sheet over the mattress, and a
down comforter with a bedspread above it. Well, no sheets appears to
be the British way – Daphne’s beds had that same arrangement (but
seemed much cleaner), and so did Sonia’s. Well, Trevellion House
was warmer and the down comforter was too warm – but it was too
cool without it. Sometime during the night I dug the duvets we
bought at ASDA out and it was better.
Tuesday,
25 March
Again,
we had quite variable weather – still cold, sometimes sunny,
sometimes rainy – even a few snow flurries.
 |
| Anne, Sonia, and Sheila |
We
had breakfast at 8 am. It turns out that Daphne’s B&B custom
is not standard in a couple of ways … most notably in that other
B&B hosts do not join their guests for breakfast. So we never
got to visit with and know Sonia like we did Daphne and Tony. But we
did visit with other guests over a very good breakfast – an older
lady named Sheila from Warrington (north of Shrewsbury in Cheshire),
a really outgoing talkative Israeli girl named Lucy (who apparently
works in Shrewsbury for the “Detsi” Company – she laughed at my
Southern drawl which in this case kept me from distinguishing the
words she rapid-fired as “Dead Sea Company” [cosmetics]; why she
works in Shrewsbury and stays at a B&B was something Anne and I
could not figure out), and Lucy’s very quiet mousy friend Odelia.
The breakfast was pretty much the same as Daphne’s, plus baked
beans but no fried toast. The fried tomatoes were larger, though –
a bit overwhelming to me. We headed out for the day from Trevellion
House only a few minutes after 9 am.
We
drove northwest and managed to find the Tourist Information Center
(TIC) in Oswestry, a town right on the border between England and
Wales – where St. Oswald, king of Northumbria, may have been killed
in battle by Penda of Mercia sometime around 642 (the location is
disputed, not that he was killed). A couple of ladies in there gave
me directions to where I could see Offa’s Dyke – a long earthen
barrier marking the boundary between England and Wales, built by the
eighth-century Anglo-Saxon king Offa of Mercia.8
With a couple of false turns, ending up a short distance into
Wales, and having to interpret from some other information I had, we
finally found it near the Old Race Course near Rhydycroesau with the
help of an electrical lineman – “Well, we don’t ever think much
about it because we live here – but there it is! – with the gorse
growing along its top.”
It was not really that much to look at –
just a bit of a ditch on the western side, but a distinct ridge of
earth about six to eight feet high with stones here and there along
the top – and the gorse, of course. It seemed to go right through
sheepland – “Sheep!” There were snow flurries coming down at
that point. That trip goal, to see Offa’s
Dyke,
accomplished, we went back to the TIC, used the facilities, and found
out how to get to St. Oswald’s Church in Oswestry, which we did.
One thing that comes to mind that I saw there is something I noticed
in many other locations across England and Scotland – memorials
containing long lists of townsmen who were killed in World War I or
II. Relatively speaking, those wars had much more devastating impact
on Britain than on the US.
Then
we headed back to Shrewsbury, parking in the Paid Parking lot along
the river off Wyle Cop a few minutes before 1 pm. We set off walking
a good bit of a walking tour I had printed off the internet, seeing a
length of the old medieval town walls, the Roman Catholic
Cathedral (Mass was going on right then so we didn’t go in), the
new St. Chad’s Church, the Quarry Park including a large
indoor swimming pool (in use), and the Welsh Bridge. “English
Bridge” and “Welsh Bridge” are, again, designations that go
back to the Middle Ages and recall the nature of Shrewsbury as a
border town between English and Welsh territories. Most of
Shrewsbury is in an easily defensible loop of the Severn River, open
only in the north, where stands Shrewsbury Castle. The English
Bridge is on the eastern side crossing the Severn; the Welsh Bridge
is on the western side. Incidentally, besides its medieval character
and the Cadfael connection, Shrewsbury is best known as the
birthplace of Charles Darwin, and we saw several statues and
commemorations of him around town.
We
made our way to the TIC near the center of town, then to the Post
Office to mail a postcard Anne had promised to Mary. We went into
Barclay’s Bank to change some £50 notes for some more negotiable
smaller bills. Then we went into St. Mary’s Church (Anglican, but
very pretty). It preserved some decorations from Old St. Chad’s,
including, according to a very amiable guide, the Jesse Window
above the altar. A Jesse Window illustrates the genealogy of Christ.
From there we went to one of the very pubs that had turned us away
yesterday – today they did have fish and chips, including peas
(it’s an English thing – these were not “mushy,” though). It
was there, at the Bull Inn, sometime after 3 pm, that I realized I
had forgotten all about going to Brother Cadfael’s Abbey Church –
which should have been the first thing we did!
After finishing our
meal with a dessert of apply pie with cream custard, we rushed across
the English Bridge, only to find (about 4:30-ish) that the Abbey
Church had closed at 3 pm. I was a bit disappointed, but I took
pictures all around the outside. The nave of the medieval church is
all that stands today, because it was where the parishioners of the
local area still called the Abbey Foregate would attend Mass, and it
is still used as a church today. But there are scattered ruins of
parts of the structure of the old abbey still to be seen, some
jutting out from the church building itself. There’s also the
pulpit of the Abbey Common Room, standing across the street right in
the middle of the Paid Parking lot we used last night – I
unknowingly parked right beside it!
By
that time, Anne’s feet were hurting, but she gamely kept up with me
walking mostly uphill back across town for some views of
Shrewsbury Castle (I was not interested in going through its museum
because it seems to all be much more recent things than I am
interested in – mainly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century). Then
we made our way once again across town to our car (“How many
times have we passed this store?” Anne asked – “Including last
night, six, I believe,” I replied).
We
then went in search of a coin-op laundry Anne had seen driving back
from Oswestry, to wash a few more things – but I was wearing my
long johns so they would just have to get a sink wash later. The
people there were very helpful to a couple of bewildered Americans –
a general thing, we found – these even brought us tea as we waited
for our wash. We made notes about our trip during that time, about
6:30, while our clothes were drying. On the way back to the B&B
we stopped and tanked up at the ASDA (by the way, I had asked our
breakfast companions and found out it is not pronounced “A-S-D-A”
but “Asda”); we also ran in and got some ice cream which we ate
in our room as we watched some more British TV – actually a show I
had heard of, The East Enders. We packed up as best we could
to leave early in the morning.
Wednesday, 26 March
Breakfast
was at 8 am again, same table companions. We managed to leave by
8:50, which put us into Durham only ten minutes past my plan (1:40
pm). It rained on us all the way – was very foggy in a couple of
places – and we made a couple of stops along the way as well. Our
route took us north basically to Chester, east across the Pennine
mountains, some of which sported snow at the higher elevations, past
Manchester to Leeds, then north to Durham along the A1 (the main
north-south highway in Britain).
After
a couple of wrong turns getting into the old part of town, we parked
on the Palace Green – with Durham Cathedral looming in front
of us and Durham Castle behind us. The whole area is
now under the aegis of UNESCO World Heritage Site status and the
University of Durham. This old part of town is, like Shrewsbury,
inside an easily defensible loop in the River Wear, with the castle
guarding the land-ward end. Our first sight of it was magnificent –
it’s the best example I saw in England of a classic
motte-and-bailey design, the oldest style of castle. In the
beginning, a castle was just a defensible area surrounded by a ditch
with a wooden palisade inside it. The earth from excavating the
ditch would be piled at one end of the defensible area to form a
mound called a “motte”; the ditch itself would typically fill up
and form a “moat” (the words are clearly related).
A wooden
fortress or “keep” would be built atop the motte. The lower
area inside the palisade was the “bailey.” Over time, the wooden
construction was replaced with stone, and more and more structures
were built; the moat would often be filled in. One thing about all
the castles and monasteries we saw on this trip – they were all the
product of five hundred or more years of continuous habitation and
construction, so they were typically of a mixture of successive
styles with the original pretty much obliterated or overbuilt. In
the case of Durham Castle, the period of habitation was much longer,
continuous for most of a thousand years from the aftermath of the
Norman Conquest, when William the Conqueror made the powerful Bishop
of Durham his main enforcer in the north. Over time, the
“Prince-Bishop” built up not only the castle, but all around the
area between the castle and his cathedral, leaving the Palace Green
empty in between. (Well, it was not originally empty – the
cathedral is even older than the castle, and the Palace Green was the
site of the original Anglo-Saxon town of Durham. In the aftermath of
the Norman Conquest, the bishops cleared that area between castle and
cathedral.) Today, the castle and most of the buildings form the
core of the University of Durham.
We
checked into our B&B
rooms in Durham Castle
(!) – normally dorm rooms for the University of Durham, but when
the students are on break their rooms are let out as
bed-and-breakfast.
 |
| Choir of Durham Cathedral |
Then we headed across the Palace Green to the
monolithic and magnificent Durham Cathedral (!!). The site of a
monastery since before the year 1000, the present structure was begun
around 1100 and stands as the main example of Norman architecture in
England. Again, continuously added to over time, it combines
Romanesque and Gothic styles. We were trying for the 2:30 guided
tour, but the tour was cancelled because a funeral was going on in
the cathedral choir
area. We spent a little while walking around outside, mainly on the
eastern side. We were unable to get around to the western side to
see that façade with the two towers – in any case, the cathedral
is so big
we would have had to get across the river to see it properly anyway.
 |
| Tomb of St. Cuthbert |
Then we went back through the rear of the cathedral to the cloister
and the Undercroft Café. We got a snack there, then spent a few
minutes in the gift shop. By that time the funeral was over, so we
went back into the cathedral and followed the self-guided tour in
Rick
Steves’ Great Britain 2008.
 |
| Galilee Chapel |
We saw the tomb
of St. Cuthbert
in the Chapel of the Nine Altars and the tomb
of the Venerable Bede
in the Galilee Chapel – my personal highlights, a couple of my
overall trip goals. St. Cuthbert was a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon
holy man we would encounter again at Lindisfarne (tomorrow); in 995
his relics were enshrined here at Durham. The “Venerable” St.
Bede is the early eighth-century author of The
Ecclesiastical History of the English People,
our main source for knowledge of early Anglo-Saxon England.
 |
| Cloister |
Unfortunately, no pictures are allowed to be taken in the cathedral,
but I did take some in the cloister9
– Durham Cathedral was a monastery as well, one of the few not to
be devastated by Henry VIII (as were Glastonbury, Shrewsbury, and
many, many others). A scene from the first Harry
Potter
movie was filmed in this cloister.
Then
we made our way back across to the Castle for the 4 pm tour – by
one of the UD students, in suit and tie, with a black robe over top!
When I first saw him coming across the bailey/courtyard from the
gatehouse to where we stood on the steps into the Great Hall, I said
to Anne, “Look! – It’s Percy Weasley!” Actually, his name
was Joel. It was an interesting tour, but I hoped for a bit more
than we got – mainly just around from the Great Hall, through the
kitchen, up the Black Staircase through the second-floor Tunstal
Gallery to the Tunstal Chapel, back to the fourth-flour Norman
Gallery then down to the relatively newly-discovered (in the last
hundred years or so, I think) original Norman Chapel. Unfortunately,
once again, they did not want any photographs taken.10
At
5:15, we went back to the Cathedral for Evensong – unfortunately,
despite what Rick Steves says about visiting choirs filling in during
university breaks, there was not one tonight, so it was more
Evensaid, but it was spiritually uplifting even if it was from
the Church of England Book of Common Prayer. It was cool to sit in
the choir area of the cathedral along with a handful of other
participants.
After
Evensong, we walked out into the town, across the Elvet Bridge near
the neck of the peninsula to an Italian restaurant suggested by Rick
Steves – Emilio’s. It was “happy hour” on entrees – this
was one of our cheaper meals. We shared a “Four Seasons Pizza”
(quartered with tomato, onion, mushroom, and ham) and Penne Pasta a
la Crema (mushrooms, onion, cream, and parmesan cheese), with Treacle
Pudding for dessert. We caught up on our notes, noting that it was
currently 7:15. Dinner was excellent.
Afterward,
we walked around a bit in downtown Durham, but it was dark and
deserted so we just went back to our room (in the Castle!) and got to
bed pretty early. The room was initially a bit cool, but once I got
the radiator by Anne’s bed going it warmed up – I actually got a
bit too warm in the middle of the night.
Thursday,
27 March
We
woke up to sunshine – it didn’t last though. It was raining
lightly on us by the time we were leaving and continued to do so for
much of the way on our first leg of today’s drive.
We
were up and packed and out of our room by 7:30. We walked around a
bit, put our stuff in our car, and found the foot path down on this
side of the river along the western façade of the Cathedral –
but it was way too close, I could not get a good angle. Given time
constraints, we never had a chance to make an excursion to the
western bank of the river to get a proper picture.
We went back up
to the castle to the front desk and checked out, then went up to the
Great Hall of Durham Castle for breakfast. We sat at a table
with a young lady from central Wales in for a conference at the
University. Another slight variation on the English Breakfast, but
this time served more like a restaurant.
We
were out on the road about ten minutes before 9 am, and made good
time for a change – even with an unplanned stop along the road.11
We had driven up the A1, turned west onto the A69, then cut onto
the B6318 and were just a few miles short of our goal of Housesteads
Fort on Hadrian’s Wall when I spied a small layby with a large
standing cross and saw the word “Heavenfield.”
I turned around and went back to the site of St. Oswald of
Northumbria’s (the king who died at Oswestry) victory over
Cadwallon of Gwynedd (a Welsh kingdom) ca. 635, by which Oswald
gained kingship in Northumbria. The way the Venerable Bede (and
Adomnán in his Life
of St. Columba)
tells it, on the night before the battle Oswald (who had grown up in
exile on the western Scottish monastery-island of Iona12)
had a vision from St. Columba of Iona assuring him of victory,
whereupon he had erected a cross with his own hands for he and his
men to pray before. The divine visitation had resulted in the name
of the battlefield. I knew it was somewhere in this area but I had
no idea we would drive right by it! Wow!
Then
we continued on to Housesteads Fort on Hadrian’s Wall – the Roman
Vercovicium.
Hadrian’s Wall was built in the 120s or thereabouts to fortify the
border between the Roman south of Britain and the barbarian Picts
(the native people of Scotland) to the north – seventy miles from
sea to sea, roughly between modern England and Scotland. Housesteads
is just one of a dozen full-scale forts along the Wall, and the best
to actually see the excavated ruins along with a surviving stretch of
the wall. It was great! We ended up taking the full two hours I had
allotted there. It was a half-mile mostly uphill hike from the TIC
to the small museum/gift shop where we spent only a few minutes.
Then it was a further hundred yards or so to the fort itself, where
we explored every nook and cranny, inside and out. I stood on
Hadrian’s
Wall,
walked along it speaking Latin – “Hic
sum, ambulans in vallum Hadrianum, loquans linguam Latinam!”
(grammatical errors and all13).
And Anne got to see more … “Sheep!” … this time being herded
by border collies.
Housesteads
Fort is a major tourist stop along Hadrian’s Wall, part of a series
of UNESCO World Heritage Sites stretching across northern Europe
along the border of the Roman Empire. It gets a lot of traffic.
There is a sign out in front of the TIC saying “Welcome!” in a
variety of languages – “Salve!” (Latin, of course),
“Croeso!” (Welsh), “Fáilte” (Scots Gaelic).
At the time, I did not know the latter, leading to a funny exchange
with one of the caretakers, a humorous old man who’d greeted me
when I first drove up by saying, “Aye, this is Northumberland,
where we see all four seasons in a day!” (I heard the same thing
everywhere we went, with the locale changed appropriately.) Near the
top of the “Welcome” sign was, “Hae ye gannin’!” –
he asked me if I knew what it meant. I guessed Scots (a dialect of
English distinct from Scots Gaelic which is another language
altogether). “No, it’s Northumbrian – proper English!”
We
missed our schedule getting back on the road by only a few minutes –
12:20 rather than straight up noon. We purchased a sandwich,
“crisps,” and a shortbread candy treat to eat on the road. Our
route took us back mainly along the A69 to the A1 then we headed
north, passing within sight of the North Sea coast a couple of times
– and arrived at the Holy Island of Lindisfarne about 2:15 – well
before the 4:25 pm tidal closure of the causeway. Lindisfarne
is “Holy Island” only about half the time. The rest of the time
it is “Holy Peninsula.” (We got there despite the one
time I scared Anne almost to death with my driving. I adapted pretty
well, as I said, despite my fears, but there were times when I would
get confused. Like when a car would come around a curve in the road
and instinct would say it was in my lane. Like [this time] I was
about to pull into a petrol station but a car was pulling out – and
I froze up unable to decide on the fly which side of that car I was
supposed to go. I stopped dead in the middle of the road – Anne
cried out, “Oh my God!” and basically assumed crash position –
and cars were flying by on both sides of us. It worked out okay,
though.) There were still plenty of day “tourists” on Holy
Island, but they were generally headed toward their cars and making
their way back across the causeway.
We
checked in at Cambridge House, a nondenominational Christian retreat
house (paired with Marygate House, which is where we actually
reported to begin with). A lady named Rachel got us situated, giving
us a quick tour of the house. (By the way, this bed actually had a
regular sheet!) 
We walked to the small Priory Museum, spent a few
minutes there, then walked all through the ruins of the Priory
itself, on the site but much later than the monastery founded after
the Battle of Heavenfield by a monk from Iona, St.
Aidan, at
the behest of the victorious King Oswald, which later in the seventh
century had St. Cuthbert as its abbot and bishop. The Priory was
established about 1100, I believe, by monks from Durham Abbey –
where as we saw yesterday St. Cuthbert’s relics eventually were
enshrined after the monks were driven from Lindisfarne by the threat
from the Vikings.14 
Right behind the abbey
ruins to
the east is a large pasture. Anne got some pictures of triplet lambs
playing with a local boy. Immediately adjacent the ruins to the west
we saw St. Mary’s Church – actually in the Middle Ages when the
Priory still was an active monastery, this was the parish church for
the people of the village that grew up outside the gates, hence, kind
of like the nave of the Shrewsbury Abbey church it was spared by
Henry VIII’s goons. 
We went down to the beach, where we could see
St.
Cuthbert’s Island
– about a hundred yards offshore, where he would retreat into
further solitude. Anne got a really nice picture of it against a
background of sunrays shining through clouds. In the distance to the
south we could just make out Bamburgh Castle, once the stronghold of
the Northumbrian kings such as Oswald. From the Priory itself to the
east on Holy Island we could see the ruins of Lindisfarne Castle
about a mile away. We never made our way to see that, though. We
were too late for the last bus tour from town (everything revolves
around the opening and closing of the tidal causeway), and the road
from the town to the castle was posted as private.
Then
we walked the streets of the town as evening fell – it did not take
us very long! The town is only about three or four streets one way,
no more than five the other. It was also very quiet – all the
shops closed when the causeway closed at 4:25. We saw the Catholic
church, St. Aidan’s, but the contrast with the Anglican St. Mary’s
was actually kind of sad. One consequence of the English Reformation
is that in most cases the really old, magnificent churches are
Anglican; the Catholic churches are much newer and generally pale in
comparison. (St. Mary’s of Glastonbury is an exception, for
whatever reason I do not know.) St. Aidan’s is very small and
modern – “sparse actually” are Anne’s words. By the way, it
was actually quite sunny, although still very cool, into the evening.
Having passed on the evening meal provided at the retreat house, we
made reservations for 7 pm at the restaurant attached to the Crown
and Anchor Pub and B&B, then we went back to the room and rested
for a spell.
Anne
had asked about us using the Marygate House washer and drier – we
took the clothes there intending to do them ourselves, but the lady
who checked us in earlier took over and said that she would handle
them and deposit them at our room along with the new bed linens for
in the morning. (This was not a B&B – we had to remake
the bed with clean linens before we left, and also fend for ourselves
in the little kitchen for breakfast. But there was no fee – the
retreat houses run on a donation basis. I left them an average B&B
fee.) We went on to the restaurant and made notes while we waited
for our food. We had leek and potato soup (huge bowls); Anne had
fish and chips (actually the best looking ones I saw the whole trip,
particularly the chips [fries]); I had the special of the day, a Pork
and Guinness casserole with mashed potatoes. Dinner was excellent
once again!
Afterward,
we walked back to our room, had tea – meeting a very old but very
funny lady in the kitchen – and headed to bed.
Friday,
28 March
We
got up, dressed, fixed our own breakfast. I had a bowl of cereal;
Anne had toast. It was windy and very rainy outside – probably the
hardest rain we saw on the trip. We visited briefly with some other
guests – including a (literally) purple-haired female “vicar and
priest(ess?)” from Edinburgh (obviously Anglican – and Anne’s
pretty sure she was the one violating the “No Smoking” policy
last night), and the little old lady from last night. We hit the
Lindisfarne Post Office/Gift Shop when it opened at 9 am to buy gifts
and souvenirs. Among other things, I bought Anne a St. Cuthbert’s
Cross necklace. Then we headed out to Edinburgh. The causeway had
opened at about 8 am, but there was still standing water on it as
well as a bunch of sand washed across it. Cars were moving across it
just fine, however.
Just
after getting back on the mainland, we were stopped at a railroad
crossing. The lights were flashing and the barrier was down, but no
train – then whoosh! – it passed by in seconds, north to
south, going at least 150 miles an hour! Once we got on the A1 we
continued northward, frequently riding right along the North Sea
coast on the way to Edinburgh.
Our
“Sat Nav” (the British term) took us right around to the Park and
Ride at Hermiston on the west of Edinburgh, at the intersection of
the A720 loop and the A71. We caught the Lothian Bus no. 25 to the
City Center, getting off a bit early at Princes Street. We walked
along that street in the general direction I knew we needed to go to
catch one of the bus tours which start from Waverly Bridge. We found
another souvenir shop, The Works, as well as a Lloyd’s Bank where
we finally exchanged the Euros Mary sent Anne. At The Works we
picked up a bunch of stuff, including an Edinburgh tee shirt for me
and an Edinburgh hoodie for Tristan. Then we ate at “The Scottish
Restaurant” (McDonald’s) for a quick bite. We found the TIC and
bought tickets for the one-hour bus tour with a live guide named
Brian.
We
did about half of the bus tour, seeing such things as: the (Sir
Walter) Scott Monument, St. John’s and St. Cuthbert’s Churches
(the live guide regaled us with the story of Burke and Hare – I
told him my last name and he said he had a lady named Burke on his
last tour), and the apartment building where J. K. Rowling lived in
the early 1990s, the café where she wrote the first Harry Potter
book, and the old castle-like school that supposedly inspired
Hogwart’s. That was all in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle perched
up on a rocky mount. We jumped off the tour as it turned onto the
Royal Mile (connecting the Castle at the western end with the Palace
of Holyroodhouse at the eastern end) because Anne saw some discounted
wool scarves, etc., in a storefront.
I walked up to the foregate of
Edinburgh Castle and got some pictures. Anne bought a pretty
blue wool cardigan. We continued the bus tour on a different bus
with a different guide, a lady whose name we did not get. We went
most of the rest of the way along the tour – past the National
Library and Museum of Scotland (separate), around to a very
modernistic Sci-Port-like museum called “Dynamic Earth,” in the
shadow of “Arthur’s Seat,” another rocky mount, around past
Holyroodhouse (the queen’s official residence in Edinburgh), past
the Robert Burns Monument, back to pretty close to where we started.
There was another loop of the tour from there, but by then I had
become worried about time and we had completed the “Old Town”
part, so we hopped off to catch the no. 25 bus back to the Hermiston
Park and Ride.
Unfortunately
“a serious accident on Haymarket” made the half-hour trip back
out to the P&R more like an hour. Then the Forth Road
Bridge across the Firth of Forth was very backed up – rush hour –
the forty-minute trip up the M90 to Kinross was at least an hour and
a half. All told we were at least an hour and a quarter late getting
to our B&B there – the Burnbank. Our hosts, the Cathcarts,
were gone to Glasgow for a wedding; a friend named Grace was there to
let us in, but she had gotten worried about us and was about to have
to leave by 5:30. We got there at 5:15 – just in time. Grace
showed us to the Blue Room (very attractively furnished), gave us all
the information we needed (and the keys), and let us know the
Cathcarts would be back about 11 pm.
We
barely lit at Burnbank before we headed back out to grab a quick bite
to eat at the Burger King at the Kinross exit and head back to
Edinburgh. It turned out that our trip back south was much quicker,
and we arrived at the Merchiston Castle School in Colinton (a western
suburb of Edinburgh) about 6:50, in plenty of time for the 7:30 first
concert of the Edinburgh Harp Festival 2008. We got our bearings and
found the theater and picked up our tickets. The concert,
7:30-10 pm, was very entertaining. We sat up close, on the fifth row
of about twenty.
At the “interim” we bought two CDs by Maíre ní
Chathasaigh (harp) and Chris Newman (guitar), and even got one
autographed by them. (They were joined for this concert by a bassist
and a percussionist. The video is of a song they played, but from a different event.) The interim included refreshments – I had a
glass of wine; Anne had apple juice and a chocolate biscuit.
We
got back to the Burnbank B&B about 11:10, finally meeting our
hosts, Ewan and Myra Cathcart. She had already changed, but
he still had on his formal kilt from the wedding. They were a very
pleasant couple. We went to bed quite late, after midnight.
Saturday,
29 March
We
had breakfast at 8 am again – since we are now in Scotland, it was
a “Cooked Breakfast,” not “English.” But it was pretty much
the same thing, except starting with some porridge – basically
oatmeal. And there was a wider selection within the basic “Cooked
Breakfast” “food groups.” For instance, we had a choice of
cereals and fruits, as well as a choice of sausages – we got pork
and apple, very tasty. Again, our hosts served us rather than
joined us, unfortunately, so we visited with them very little.
We really wish we could have gotten to know them better. At one
point, Ewan asked if we live near where Tabasco Sauce is made, then a
few minutes later, right as we were leaving, he appeared in a Tabasco
tie a Baptist church choir from Lafayette had given him. (From
various reading materials laid about, it was apparent that Ewan and
Myra are pretty religious, and we gathered that they were part of the
group hosting that choir.) He also regaled us with a couple of
anecdotes about Holy Island. The one that sticks with me is that the
people there have a taboo against saying the word “pig” – they
refer to one as a “young’un” or “that article over there!”
We
were off by 9:15 headed north, continuing along the M9 to Dunkeld.
There we saw the Cathedral
of St. Columba,
Kenneth MacAlpin’s royal-ecclesiastical center ca. 850. Cinead
mac Ailpin
was the king of both Dalriada Scottish and Pictish descent who
unified them into one Scottish kingdom (he’s considered the first
Scottish king15)
– and translated some of the relics of St. Columba from Iona to
Dunkeld. Once again, much of the church is in ruins (thanks to Reformation iconoclasts) – only what was once the choir and the chancel survive as the
modern parish church and a small museum.
In that museum I saw
another of my trip goals – a Pictish stone, “The
Apostles’ Stone”
(named for one side showing two rows of six human figures each –
the interpretation is not unanimous. There is a battle scene on the
other side). Not one of the older stones with the mysterious, almost
hieroglyphic symbols, unfortunately, but pretty impressive
nonetheless.16
Anyway, the main part of the church stands only as a roofless shell
overlooking the River Tay. We walked briefly around part of the
little town, finding a bakery where we got two scones, going in the
requisite gift shop, then were back on the road.
We
stopped briefly at Blair Atholl for petrol, then a few miles down the
road (at Myra’s suggestion) at Bruar, which was kind of like a
Cracker Barrel – a restaurant with a country-store/gift shop plus a
mini-mall around it. Cold as it was, we got ice cream there. Then
we were back on the road, passing up across desolate moorland through
the Grampian Mountains into the Highlands of Scotland.
Magnificent. Many of the mountains had snow atop them in much
greater amounts than the Pennines in central England. (We had also
seen some snow patches on the ground round about Hadrian’s Wall on
Thursday.) But it was so misty and cloudy that in many cases we
could not really distinguish where the top of the mountain was.
We
lost about thirty minutes due to some kind of oil tank truck mishap
ahead of us, but made our way up the M9 through the mountains to
Inverness and turned down the A82 to drive along Loch Ness
down to Drumnadrochit. We stopped at one point where I saw a path
down to the shore of the loch – I picked up a couple of rocks as
souvenirs.
We
arrived at the Loch Ness Centre in Drumnadrochit about 3:20 – but
their boat cruise that I had found on the internet was not running.
The chap in the lobby suggested the Clansman Hotel a few miles back
up the road, however, where we managed to get tickets for the (last)
4 pm Jacobite Cruise, a one-hour trip basically to and from
the ruins of Urquhart Castle (which is actually near Drumnadrochit).
That cruise was an experience. Even though reason says that there is
no such thing as the Loch Ness Monster, well…. We started out on
the upper deck, and got some pictures, but cold wind and misty rain
drove us to the covered lower deck where they were even selling hot
tea. At one point it felt like something hit the bottom of the boat.
Predictably they said it was Nessie’s tail. All through the
cruise a tape gave a running commentary both on what we were seeing,
the history of the Loch and the monster sightings, and general
Scottish history with an emphasis on the Jacobites – largely
Scottish Highlander adherents of the Stuart line of claimants to
kingship after the ouster of King James II in 1689 – Jacobus
is Latin for “James.” Anyway, back at the Clansman dock, we went
into the gift shop for more geegaws.
Then
we drove back to Drumnadrochit to the Knowle B&B, where we
checked in with our hostess Mirjam (she and her husband – we barely
ever met him – are actually Dutch). A little past 6 pm we went out
and (following Mirjam’s suggestion) had a good meal at Fiddler’s
Pub and Restaurant. Anne had gnocchi and vegetable gratin, I
had “Hunter’s Chicken”; we each had desserts – Anne a
chocolate almond tart, me “Columba’s Cheesecake” – we
switched halfway. I also had a bottle of Fraoch’s Heather Ale with the meal. We
wrote up our notes for the past couple of days.
Back
at the B&B, we went ahead and changed our watches forward to
“Summer Time” (like our Daylight Savings Time, but a few weeks
later – so starting tomorrow the difference between British time
and Central US time is back to the normal six hours). Even though we
had been depending on our cell phone alarms to get us up every other
morning, I was not sure how they would handle the time change, so I
set my watch to wake us up. We got to bed fairly early.
Sunday,
30 March
We
were up, packed, and dressed for 8 am breakfast. Anne decided to go
light – just porridge and yogurt. I had the Cooked Breakfast – a
fried egg, mushrooms, baked beans, “bacon,” sausage and a fried
tomato (I declined the Black Pudding, which includes blood – yech!)
plus cereal and toast.
We
were out a bit before 9 am, continuing down the A82 the length of
Loch Ness southwest through the Great Glen, the big valley cutting
straight through the Highlands, stopping a couple of times for photo
ops. Pretty quickly after leaving Drumnadrochit we got a good view
of the ruins of Urquhart Castle. St. Columba of Iona once made a trip up the Great Glen to the castle of a Pictish king, either at the site of Urquhart Castle or at Inverness. Incidentally, Adomnán’s Life of St. Columba contains the first historical reference to the Monster. Continuing on, we drove for
quite some distance with the Loch just to our left (but fifty to a
hundred feet down) and sheer rocky cliff just to our right.
Sometimes we would see waterfalls in the rock on the right. Once we
had passed the southwestern end of Loch Ness, as we neared Fort
William, but missed (in that we were not sure which one was) Ben
Nevis to the south, the highest mountain in Scotland. Of course, per
usual, it rained on us off and on the entire way, and many of the
mountains were shrouded in mist.
We
arrived in Fort William twenty minutes before the 11 am Mass. It was
very nice. The church (another St. Mary’s) was consecrated like
our own Immaculate Conception in Natchitoches (we could tell by the
crosses inscribed in the walls). One big difference was that the
kneelers did not have pads – ouch! We were out of Mass and back on
the road by 12 noon, continuing south along the A82. We stopped at
the TIC in Ballachulish, then again just a couple miles further along
at Glencoe, the site of a treacherous massacre of Clan MacDonald by
Campbells in the service of the English during the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Jacobite rebellions – after the Campbells had
accepted the MacDonalds’ hospitality. At the Glencoe TIC we had a
light sandwich lunch – and found a pressed penny machine – Anne
pressed one for Tristan. We drove on through more magnificent
terrain, mountains on every side – but the road was very windy and
treacherous. At one of the TICs I had seen a petition to do
something about the A82, “The Most Dangerous Road in Britain.” I
could see why.
At
one point (after a couple other photo stops), we came upon a layby
with large Scottish deer right there with people, as well as a gift
stall, a hot drinks stall, and a bagpiper playing for donations!
(I
dropped him a couple of pounds.) We continued southward along Loch
Lomond to Paisley and the Glasgow Airport Travelodge, where we found
a warm reception (in contrast to London). The girl at the desk
walked us to our room to make sure everything was all right – and
it was.
We
dropped our bags there at the hotel then emptied the car and took it
to the drop-off point. (I took some pictures right before we turned
it in, just in case.) We had put 1405 miles on it since last
Saturday morning. We left it there an hour and 45 minutes early –
4:15 pm, with all of 3/8 tank of petrol (they gave it to us virtually
empty). A bus took us right back to the Travelodge. We had
considered catching a bus to Glasgow, but decided to stay in the
hotel for the evening. We ate supper at the Bar Café, catching up
on our notes. We had fish and chips one last time – this time with
truly mushy peas but frozen “chips.” Unfortunately, Anne was
disappointed when the waitress told her the sticky toffee pudding was
“finished,” that is, they had run out. (The rather overworked
young lady seemed to be Eastern European of some kind.) Anne had had
an envie for sticky toffee pudding ever since she saw it on the menu
at the pub on Holy Island but had been too full to get it, then did
not find it on any other menu until here at the Travelodge. After
supper, we organized our bags,17
read, got drinks from the bar, then finally went to bed.
Monday,
31 March
We
were up at 5 am and out a few minutes after 6 am. A shuttle
transferred us across the highway to the airport. We found out there
that our 9:30 flight to London-Heathrow had been cancelled, but they
put us on an earlier flight. We passed through security with a bit
more scrutiny than at Houston, but some things are no different.
Their equivalents of TSA agents are just like ours – typically
pissy, probably waiting for the good job opportunity at McDonalds.
Late add-ons, we could not sit together – both of us had middle
seats in rows of three. The flight went okay – a bit more than an
hour in the air, with another in-flight GPS showing us our progress.
They served us a miniature English Breakfast along the way. Then we
had to transfer from Heathrow Terminal 5 to Terminal 4 – a twenty
minute bus ride, standing room only.18
We went through another security check, then had a long wait – the
flight to Houston was not until 1:15. Anne was finally able to use
some of the Euro coins (the bank in Edinburgh would only exchange
bills) to get some last minute gifts. I also bought the first Harry
Potter
book in a paperback edition with its real
title – Harry
Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
(The American publisher believed that “philosopher” would turn
dumb Americans away, so changed it to “sorceror” instead.) We
boarded the plane about 1 pm – or rather Anne did. They pulled me
aside at random right before boarding and subjected me to another
search,
including a pat-down. I think this was the fifth time today I had to
take off my boots. The big black guy conducting the search was,
however, daunted by my bag. I was carrying the red duffel bag into
which Anne had put all – all
– our souvenirs. He took out a couple of layers, said, “This bag
is very complex!”
and let me go on. Anne had gotten a little worried. First, she had
tried to stay with me but they would not let her. Then she thought
it was taking too long. Anyway, we finally got situated. We sat
about the same place in the rear of the plane as the flight to the
UK, except that we were on the left side this time. We took off a
bit late, about 1:30 or so, but landed pretty much on time at 11:30
British time – 5:30 pm Houston time. They gave us a pretty good
meal really early in the flight – but then little or nothing. We
each watched parts of a couple movies, but not the whole thing in
either case. Got very little of a nap, either. I watched the
in-flight GPS most of the rest of the time, and read.
By
the time we got through Customs and Baggage Claim, it was 7 pm (1 am
according to our bodies). We picked up our car from Fast Park, drove
almost an hour to Anne’s sister Jude’s house, stopping at a
couple places near there: Target to get me some contact lens
solution because I ran out; Barnes and Noble looking for the second
volume in The
Camulod Chronicles
(I was nearing the end of the first on the plane) – I did not find
it, but bought Steven Saylor’s Roma;
Taco Bell. Once at Jude’s19
we reconsolidated our luggage and Anne ran a load of laundry. We
finally got to bed about 10 pm or so, which felt like 4 am.
One
bit of adjustment for us coming back is going to be the temperature –
while we were there the digital thermometer in the rental car read
between the extremes of about 2C and 9.5C (36F and 47F), more
typically between 5 and 8 C (40 and 46 F) – we landed in Houston
with it over 80F – and the Customs area of Bush International did
not seem to have any air going.
Tuesday,
1 April 2008
We
were up pretty early – jet lag was telling our bodies that 5 am was
really 11 am! We left Jude’s before 8 am, got breakfast at a
kolache shop, and hit the road for home. We ate at the Jack in the
Box in the town just south of Lufkin, and arrived back in
Natchitoches some time before 2 pm – in time to pick Tristan up
from school. Our big trip came to an end.
* * *
Addenda
- I am adding any other things that come to mind here, rather in the text, because getting those pictures to reposition properly when text is added is too difficult.
- As we were walking through Gatwick Airport soon after arrival, we were immediately exposed to the strangest British name we came upon during the trip. A man was holding a placard to welcome a traveler named “Sourbutt.” We thought it must be some kind of joke and laughed about it for a couple days. But they really exist – www.ancestry.com shows a couple clusters of Sourbutts in England! But it made us think of “Mr. ‘Titspuhvuht’” in the first Bridgit Jones movie.* * *Notes
1. Out-of-sequence alphabetic tags results from the way I had to
program Google Maps to accurately reflect our itinerary.
2. Tristan did not want to come on this trip and we did not make him.
It turned out that the Boy Scouts were having their big Easter Break
hike during this period anyway. So Anne’s sister and mother came
to Natchitoches, took him to Lafayette for a few days, then brought
him back for the Scout trip which departed on Wednesday the 26th.
Finally, they came back and stayed with him from his return
Saturday until our own on Tuesday 1 April.
3. I actually brought several books, but only ever read in this one.
Anne gave me what-for about those books, their weight, and the space
they were taking up several times during the week.
4. The exchange rate hovered within a cent or two of $2 per pound –
everything was relatively very expensive.
5. Anne later admitted she had worried the whole flight and all day
Friday and Friday night about it.
6. It was actually about £1.07p per liter. At home, the price of gas
was increasing, and had just passed about $3.10 per gallon.
7. I did not realize until much later, writing this journal and tracing
our route in an atlas, that we passed within 150 yards of
Stonehenge. That prehistoric megalithic structure was not on my
list of things to see, but it would have been cool to glimpse it
anyway. If we had not gotten lost earlier in the day, there may
have been enough light to do so. As it was, it was pitch black.
8. Northumbria? – Mercia? – Until ca. 900, Anglo-Saxon England was
not a single kingdom but a group of kingdoms. Northumbria was
basically the north. Mercia was the midlands. Among the others
were East Anglia, Kent, and Wessex.
9. The gift shop sells a £5 CD with jpegs of the highlights – I
bought it of course.
10. And this time I am not aware of a CD for sale. That is one reason
we bought the guidebooks everywhere.
11. It was along this drive that we saw one of several signs we wish we
had gotten pictures of – in this case, “DO NOT RELY ON SAT-NAV”
(the British term for GPS). Another we saw near the end of the
trip, in Fort William, Scotland, had an icon of a bent old man and
old lady, saying something like, “ELDERLY PEOPLE.”
12. Iona was the site of St. Columba’s monastery, established ca. 560
from northern Ireland, which became the northern focus of
Christianity in Britain in the next century. It was the spiritual
center of the western Scottish kingdom of Dalriada, itself an import
from northern Ireland. The major goal for this trip that went
unfulfilled was to visit Iona and maybe stay there overnight.
Logistics and uncertainty regarding the weather at this time of year
scratched that idea … this time.
13. It should be “in vallo Hadriano” – what I said was
“walking into Hadrian’s Wall,” which I am sure would
have been a sight in itself. And I think “in
muro Hadriano” would be more
correct still.
14. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 793, Lindisfarne was
the site of the very first recorded Viking raid in northern Europe.
After suffering several such raids, by the late 800s the monks
finally abandoned the island for the mainland, carrying the relics
of St. Cuthbert first to Chester-le-Street for over a century and
then (995) to Durham.
15. A brief history lesson: When the Romans ruled southern Britain,
basically modern England and Wales, during the first four centuries
AD, they called the people of modern Scotland Picti, “the
Painted People,” from their elaborate tattoos and war paint (think
Mel Gibson in Braveheart). The Scotti lived in
Ireland. Ca. 500, some of the northern Irish Scots migrated to
northwestern Britain and established the kingdom of Dalriada along
the western coast and islands. Over the next couple hundred years,
the Scots and the Picts competed for control, until Kenneth MacAlpin
united in his person the two royal lines and created “Scotland.”
16. Seeing one of the older-style stones proved logistically impossible.
For a long time I had planned to cut across to Aberlemno, about an
hour out of our way, risking our scheduled arrival at Loch Ness for
a chance to see two standing alongside the road and one in the
churchyard there. It was actually fairly late in the planning that
I happened upon a website that revealed that those stones are
literally boxed up – covered and out of sight – from 1 October
to 1 April, to protect them from the elements. I would miss them by
days. Then I had decided on Sueno’s Stone, which is more like the
Apostles’ Stone but a lot bigger (thirteen feet tall, I think),
sitting alongside a road about 45 minutes east of Inverness –
permanently covered by a glass enclosure, but worried about the
time. Finally, studying up on Scottish history I learned about
Kenneth MacAlpin and Dunkeld, and the fact that the chancel museum
there has a Pictish stone presented itself as a way to kill two
birds with one stone (so to speak). Adaptability – that’s the
name of the game!
17. Although we managed to bring everything we needed as carry-on to the
UK, we knew that going home we would have to check luggage – with
stuff we bought we had too much. So we brought a collapsible bag
inside our carry-on.
18. But dealing with the literally just-opened Terminal 5 as little as
possible was a good thing. It opened Friday, I believe, and while
we were in the bank in Edinburgh a TV was showing what the caption
called “Chaos at Terminal 5.” We were worried, although as it
turned out the real problem was baggage being checked in there –
the system apparently broke completely down. Since we were checking
our baggage at Glasgow and it was just transferring at Heathrow, we
were told we would probably be okay, as it turned out we were.
19. Jude and Paul were not there, doing Cat[astrophe] duty in the Dallas
area [Paul is an insurance adjustor, and there were recently major storms with hail damage in the area], but we have a key and their gracious permission.
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