There are guided tours, I think, but not from 12:30 to 1:30. Luckily there is some about it in the guidebooks. The name means 'Lark's Nest.' The Castle was complete for less than a year when Edward I lay siege to it. In 1634 a Renaissance facade was put on the inner courtyard. The Castle was abandoned during the Covenanter's wars and has gone into disrepair.
Our last castle of a three-castle day was Dean Castle in Kilmarnock. This is a castle with a dull history. The walls are ten-foot-thick stone. All they have ever had to hold off has been snow and rain. A considerable amount of the latter it held off today.
September 12 (7:56 AM): Well, I have intentionally let myself get behind by more than 24 hours. I now have a lot to do, but I also have a lot of time to do it in. I am sitting in the Edinburgh train station, waiting for a train that will not be leaving for another 2-1/2 hours. It would be hard to tell you everything that has happened to me in the last 24 hours. But that's okay. Most of it you wouldn't care about anyway.
So where was I? Oh, yes. As usual, in the rain. I was in Kilmarnock at Dean Castle. The Castle itself is the center attraction of the town park. If you have a local library card, you can get in free. Unfortunately, they wouldn't give me one. 'They' refers to some people walking through the park. I could have bought a small piece of property to get a library card, but decided that would be stupid. I paid the two pounds and went into the Castle. Now we'd come at a bad time. Not just because the Castle looked less than its best in the rain--if that were the case it would only rarely look better. No, we came at a time when the tour was halfover. The lady said we could join it at the halfway point and then get the first part of the next tour. I had pictured joining a group of ten people being led by a professional. Not quite. It was a teenager taking around two more who apparently were trying to get a little free entertainment out of their library cards. I asked a question and immediately the guide brightened up. The rest of what he said seemed directed to me.
Apparently Kilmarnock, the Castle's old owner, was a patron of Robert Burns. One of the rooms was full of Burns memorabilia. The guide was describing the heraldry and the statues, etc. Now one of my books talked about a legend that old Kilmarnock had a servant who'd seen an apparition of a bloody rolling head that was considered a prediction of Kilmarnock's own execution. I asked to see the room that took place in. It turned out it was a room right near where we were. He noted it was cooler than other rooms in the Castle, but was also an exterior room that was not well-insulated. Hardly the sort of thing that was likely to send the creepy-crawlies up my spine.
Well, that was the end of the tour and our guide took us to the keep where we saw the Great Hall. Now that was pretty interesting. Lots of suits of armor, tapestries, that sort of thing. It was a little hard to understand the guide, since like most Scotsmen he spoke with a funny accent, not plainly like I do. After that we went to the floor above and saw a large display of medieval instruments. I asked some questions about how much of the music was memorized. Apparently this was about the time that the five-line musical notation came in. One of the instruments actually had a piece of music of that notation inside the sounding box.
September 13 (1:18 AM): (Switching back to United States Eastern Daylight Time) I have spent a night on a sleeper car on a British train. I say a sleeper car is a technological device showing tremendous ingenuity and progress toward the problem of creating comfortable sleeping accommodations on a train. That is not, however, the same thing as comfortable. While I have found sleeping on a boat to be fairly comfortable because the rocking is rhythmic, a train's movements are more random. We woke up several times in the night, particularly when the fire alarm went off. Apparently there was a short in the system. As the porter told us, 'That seems to happen all the time. And it's worse than just that. When it goes off like that, it wakes me up.' The porter is something of a card. Always joking. They probably sent him to smile school.
(3:12 AM): In any case, the tour of Dean Castle ended with the music room. We looked around a little more. The guide had told us, curiously, that it was all right to take flash pictures even of the tapestries. His claim is that only old flashbulbs really do any damage. I wonder if that is really true.
Well, when we were done we returned to the car and drove into Ayr for our final B&B. B&Bs tend to be a mixed bag. Our final one was actually pretty nice. It was a big comfortable room in a house that was full of plants and flowers. It had twin beds set foot to foot.
We headed for dinner, stopping first at a Safeway(!) grocery. Our flight home is supposed to have no meals so we wanted to pick up provisions for the trip home. Some of what we got were cookies or sweet biscuits. Earlier we'd tried their Scottish Abernathies (a richer version of what tastes something like an animal cracker) and Ginger Perkins (ginger snaps). This time we got orange cookies. They don't really taste orange, but they contain orange peel oil and smell like orange peels. If that sounds strange, in India deserts often come with rose syrup that has a strong scent of roses. We also got chocolate-chip gingers--like a ginger snap but with chocolate chips (big surprise). I don't actually care for them because the chips are too sweet. Also we got Scottish oatcakes. They look like cookies. Very strange. When you taste them, they at first remind you of unsalted pretzels. After you eat them for a little while you discover the taste is closer to Cheerios.
I got a can of a different brand of ginger beer and Evelyn got a can of dandelion-flavored soda. For dinner we chose a pub. I ordered fried scampi. Now where we are, scampi is a way of preparing seafood, not the food itself. Here I guess scampi is the name of a type of fish. With the trip coming to an end, I ordered it. I also ordered an appetizer of potato skins.
Potato skins turned out to be a pleasant surprise. They are different than in the United States. Rather than six or seven pieces that are basically baked potatoes with some of the center scooped out, they are a large plate of fried potato peelings. I guess that doesn't sound very good. Actually it is just what you do want. Most of the vitamins are in the jacket and it also has the most interesting consistency. In any case, they were quite good, though the sauces were not all that keen. There were three dishes, one with a tomato sauce, one with a thin sour cream and chive sauce, and one with a flavorless hot sauce. Scampi turned out to be a little harder to recognize. I think it was shrimp. I dissected a few. It had a fried coating. The inside is made up of smaller pieces that were shrimp-like in consistency, if not actually shrimp.
(5:10 AM): Well, we are waiting here in Gatwick. Apparently either Virgin Atlantic or our travel agent booked us on a flight that doesn't exist, at least to hear Virgin Atlantic tell it. We are now booked on a 4:40 PM flight (11:40 EDT). So we will have a lot of airport time. Well, it will give me a chance to get caught up on logs. I hope the people meeting us check with the airport. Actually we may give them a call.
Well, after dinner we returned to the room and consolidated our belongings into the travel bags and knapsacks. I read a little about our last day and we watched a little British telly, then went to sleep.
Saturday morning was rainy and ugly. We had our last B&B breakfast and set out for Culzean Castle. This is a castle on a beautiful cliff overlooking the water. In the rain it looked pretty dreary. The name is pronounced Kul-AY-an, by the way. It was owned by the Kennedy family, who were descended from the Earls of Carrick. The land was obtained from Allan Stewart, a local abbot. Gilbert Kennedy apparently got the Earl to sign away the land by having the abbot stripped naked, bound to a spit, and roasted, while being liberally basted with oil every few minutes to prevent burning. After a while the abbot agreed to sign away the land. He later renounced the paper, claiming for some reason that it was signed under duress. Kennedy decided that the first time he tried the recipe it had turned out underdone. He once again tried the recipe until the meat was tender and juicy and very ready to sign. The dish turned out somewhat more expensive than originally planned. The Privy Council ruled that the lands would go to Kennedy, but he owed the abbot a very large 2000 pounds and a pension.
The Castle itself, oddly enough, was hard to find. It is well-hidden deep in a park and I headed off in the wrong direction. Well, that was corrected eventually. The Castle consists of two buildings separated by a large courtyard. There is an archway leading to the courtyard and at the top of the arch is a cherubic boy on a fish holding an arrow as if to stab his piscine steed. I told Evelyn that the Castle was dedicated to cruelty to fish.
The first room you go in in the Castle is sort of an armory with hundreds of swords and guns decoratively placed on the walls in pretty patterns. Most of the rest of the Castle is 'look at the affluence' rooms. You know--fancy beds, fancy tables, fancy paintings, fancy tableware. All okay to see, but not really my cup of tea.
They had the usual set of fireplace screens. Women of the day used to wax their faces in order to look pale and to smooth out wrinkles. If they sat in front of the fire with the heat on their wax faces, they would look like the climax of H. Rider Haggard's SHE. So instead they would have these things that looked like music stands but in the place where you'd put the music was instead a vertical rectangle of wood. They would place this between their faces and the fire.
These fire screens would be decorated with things like sampler patterns. The one I saw at Culzean had the alphabet but the 'Q' was instead a mirror-image 'P', much as it would be in script.
There were a set of rooms given over to a single hero in British history. Who? Dwight David Eisenhower. These rooms were set up to honor him and his memory. They had been given to him by the British following World War II to do with as he liked while he was alive, and they set up the display when he died.
Now a curious thing is the arrows that showed you which way to go gave you the choice of seeing or bypassing these rooms. Anywhere else they directed you, they just assumed if you were not interested you'd walk quickly. But if you did not want to see a tribute to an American general, you could skip it entirely. Draw what conclusions you wish.
For reasons unexplained, there was also a room of ship models including one perfectly normal ship constructed of bones from French prisoners' meat rations.
Well, that finished our visiting in this neck of the country, so we popped back into the car and headed back to Edinburgh.
We made one slight diversion to go to Cairnpapple Hill. This is a site that was used for burials from 3000 BC to about 100 AD. Today you enter a concrete dome protecting graves from what are called the second and third of five phases. The second phase was 2500-2000 BC; the third phase was 2000-1600 BC. The second-phase tomb is a pit surrounded by seven large stones, mostly two feet high, but one is four or five feet high. The third phase has a burial cist that consists of what looks like a tomb whose sides consist of piled stones and which is covered at the top with a large horizontal monolith. Outside the concrete dome (which is, of course, modern and present only to make the tombs accessible) is a cairn (i.e., a pile of small rocks). This is pocked with hemispherical holes four feet wide and two feet deep. They are maybe five or six feet apart. This, I explained to Evelyn, is proof that golf was once a much faster and easier game.
The weather had cleared up a bit so our last ancient site was somewhat nicer than expected. |
