Just some final oddments from our Scottish driving tour before I sign off this photo album.
I saw this moss-festooned gravestone with its inverted dove in the graveyard of Grace Darling, the famous maritime heroine.
I've often wondered what happened to Candy and Andy, those strange dolls used by Gerry Anderson's Century 21 pictured here eating ice-cream!
Well they may well be here in this shop window in Braemar dressed in their best highland tartans!
What do you think?
How about some centuries old graffiti?
This was part of a bunch of scribbles scrawled into the walls of Braemar castle.
The guide told us they were made by soldiers in the 1700's stationed in the castle and bored stiff.
Here's a shot of our final accommodation, over the border in England. This fine old huge and isolated Northumbrian farmhouse was a real gem, brimming with ancient and eerie charm. Straight out of a ghost story! The full cooked breakfast was to die for!
and finally, as a footnote to our summer tour in Scotland, a big country reminiscent of the splendour and beauty of Tolkien's Middle Earth, messing about with my phone I snapped a negative image that reminded me of an old LP I used to have, Bo Hansson's Lord of the Rings!
Have you heard this old LP readers?
I'm always drawn to initials, names and dates, which are found carved and engraved in and around the walls of old buildings and historical locations. They fascinate me! What wonderfully weathered reminders of lives lived in a harsher times, long before we rocked up with our creature comforts and digital technology.
ReplyDeleteI've really enjoyed your travelogue, Woodsy. Yep, looking at the pic of the isolated Northumbrian farm house, I think you're right... it does look like it could tell a good ghost story or two :)
Thanks Tone. I agree. Old grafitti is enchanting, just a pen or a spike away from the writer's own hand! I understand there's some in Pontefract castle nearby to us when it was full of civil war prisoners and for a short time the capital of England on account of the King, Richard II, being imprisoned there temporarily!
DeleteThanks for the extensive travelogue Woodsy, the next best thing to being there yourself!
ReplyDeleteThanks Arto. It was fun to post too. Sadly we couldn't get to the Hamilton Toy Collection as it was too far off our route. I did think about you as we passed through Queensferry, twice!
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