Background foregrounded
Sunday, 21 June 2015
Spotted this airplane-car with the lovely fender-fairings tucked back in this yard and had to smile—what dynamic design.
Musings
Pabst everywhere
Monday, 15 June 2015
One benefit of enduring (embracing) the east-to-west time change is that I’m awake pretty darned early. Given that this week the highs are predicted to be in the mid-90s, early is required for endurable (outdoor) exercise. So, I was out well before the sun brought much light to the sky, and all the night-security lights still lit up…even this venerable bar (aka pub).
Moving on…
Tuesday, 9 June 2015
Turns out we are B people; turns out B on this train is the quiet car…nice! The train-cars on this long-distance route (London–Edinburgh, I think) have alphabetical designations A through F, plus K and I forget what else. The Guru found mid-day, off-time tix for us for £13 apiece each way, London–York—a great deal!
While northbound our car, and I think the train in general, was lightly occupied; southbound, today, there were only a few empty seats. We got lucky, and only had companions at our table for about a half-hour of the ride, an older couple en route to visit their daughter in Sardinia for a month….
The Henry Moore Arch, with a display-management strategy that imitates Stonehenge, where the hoi palloi are kept at bay by fences. Rabbits, however, at least here, were dining by the half-dozen on the edge of the fenced-off greensward. (Would not normally use that word, but it fits here in London….)
We’re staying in a “new” neighborhood, near Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. They are one contiguous green on my smartphone map with two named zones, confusing…plus I found this on an official website: “Kensington Gardens covers 242 acres and was originally part of Hyde Park.”* We strolled in both, after an early dinner….
We started at the Italian Gardens, where we began to discover heavy use across the park at this hour by Iranian(?) couples and small groups. The women tended to accent black with florescent or bright orange, e.g., in sneakers. Is this some kind of nationalism? A signal of availability? Mystery….
This Royal Park celebrates many royals, including this relief of Queen Victoria in the Italian zone. The quoted price of making the stone sculptures in the Italian Garden was around £200, if I remember correctly. Not sure what that is in modern £s.
Check out this giant installation honoring a gold-crusted Prince Albert. He’s seated in a style we saw the Romans use, and I assume they borrowed/imitated from the Greeks. For the Romans anyway, seated on a special chair was a big deal for the leaders. I don’t know if it carried more status than seated on a horse, or if it was a different connotation entirely (e.g., referring to non-military leadership?).
Anyway, the sheer extent of this park in such a populous city is amazing. After all the cities we visited in Scotland, almost all with a castle on a high point, London’s layout, on comparatively flat ground, feels quite different.
* Apparently, in 1536 good ol’ Henry VIII created the park as a private/crown hunting ground. It was opened to proper members of “the public” (thus, only the few) in 1637.
Left bank, River and Firth of Clyde
Saturday, 6 June 2015
Mostly, today’s theme was windy. With rain. Not mist. The big drops—Rain with a capital R.
We have used Miss Voice and blue-dot navigation throughout our trip. The way G**gleMaps is set up, the voice informs of a pending roundabout, with which “exit” to take. This is almost always accurate (unless there’s new construction), but the thing that confounds us is that when you are in the roundabout, you are told to exit on a certain named street. It is a rare roundabout that has a street name. Route numbers, towns, yes; but no street names. This custom/programming choice introduces confusion….
This morning we had an unexpected two-fer. We set out for the soundstage where Outlander (Starz version) is being shot. It’s in that grey-blue building in the center-background. The trucks area gate was open, but the walk-up/reception gate was locked up tight. There was a special instruction sign for people who came for costume fittings.
Here’s the two-fer part. We tried an escape out the back of the industrial park that became a dead-end, and…found a sign…for the Antonine Wall! (I said no more Romans…oops.) Yup, I could see the wall ditch, etc. extending each way from the sign, left and right at this angle. A fine surprise!
We also made a fast stop to see the market street of Kilsyth. This is another town where the Livingstons of a dozen generations back in my ancestry lived. It was then called Monyabroch (ca. 1500s).
The bar—excuse me: pub to the right is called the Scarecrow. Would sometime love to hear the story behind that! (Another pint, please!)
Regarding the sign to the left, how confusing is it for a butcher shop to list a cut of meat for XYZ pounds per pound (that is £XYZ per pound).
We parked just off Market Street at Market Square, very lucky to find a space on a rainy morning…. Note that this alley leading upward is named U.P. LANE. It leads up to U.P. ROAD. Both may refer to United Presbyterian (church). No one making internet entries seems to be sure. I took it as a ghostly link to descendants of the Livingstons with connections to way northern Michigan….
Let’s wrap this with some architecture bits….
Unusual bridge in Glasgow…a single arch that crosses over the carriageway deck.
More red sandstone…like St. Andrews Cathedral, and many, many more buildings. I haven’t seen any quarries identified as for this stone, but there must be big holes out there where it all came from…. I don’t know if I’ve been seeing façades etc. of Old Red Sandstone or New Red Sandstone—or both. I think both are common outcrops….
Fine lighthouse…we bagged joining the locals spending their Saturday at venues we had some interest in, and visited a mall (Starbucks) and drove along the Firth of Clyde, then more of the Firth of Clyde…. So we saw many navigation features on land and sea, breaking waves (splash!), and even a spot of sunshine. It came out when we were just past this lighthouse…brilliant for maybe four minutes….
Just one more of those “original” or “first place in Scotland” comments…. We’re overnighting in Ayr. Scotland’s first parliament was held here in 1315, lead by Robert the Bruce (aka Robert de Brus, in Norman), who ruled from 1306–1329. He’s the one who won at Bannockburn, where we began our day, in 1314….
Also, Ayr is often listed as the birthplace of the poet Robert Burns. It was really in Alloway, but that village is now in the Ayr metro area…so I guess it’s all the same….
Very vs mildly dilapidated
Friday, 5 June 2015
In the tourist propaganda, you see Arbroath called the birthplace of Scotland. This abbey was founded in 1178 by monks from Kelso, one in the Roxburgh border-abbey cluster. It took decades to build and the soft sandstone used for carved stone detail has become greatly eroded. Arbroath Abbey became the wealthiest in Scotland, and that was probably partly why it hosted a gathering in 1320 that composed the Declaration of Arbroath, which set forth Scotland’s independence from England, and finally was signed by Edward III of England in 1328. This was very early in his long reign, which lasted from 1327 to 1377. Of course, by the 1330s, Edward was invading Scotland…ah, the conflicts have gone on and on between these two groups….
We enjoyed the town of St. Andrews more than we expected…. We looked at the castle from afar, admiring its “corner lot” above the sea. The tide was out…and this huge rectangular pond revealed…we never figured it out…. In the 1300s the castle was controlled alternately by Scotland and England, and in the 1400s it was held by Scotland. The later history…rather brutal….
We wandered among the ruins of the cathedral, another one with bodies and headstones planted where the building used to be…. This was the east end of the church, looking at the inside of the wall behind the altar. I was surprised how stable this huge section looked, even without the side walls it used to have.
If I remember correctly, this was the back wall of one side of the monastery’s courtyard. I loved the row of benches anchoring it in the present.
Speaking of the present, we found this fellow doing sign-maintenance on a high ladder at a main corner in old-town, near the University.
Also, JCB spotted this rooftop humor…. That is one UGLY rat…it is a rat, isn’t it? Not two cats?
St. Andrews was not our only stop…we also climbed into nearly every accessible nook and cranny of this nearly-unchanged-since-Medieval-days castle, which you may recognize if you’re a Starz Outlander fan…. The real world calls it Doune Castle, and most of the construction we see dates to the late 1300s. Movie-makers have visited here with their cameras for decades…including for the Elizabeth Taylor version of Ivanhoe (released in 1952); Monty Python and the Holy Grail, shot in 1974; and the Game of Thrones TV series….
The title does NOT refer to the Guru and me…in either order….
Rubbish weather
Tuesday, 2 June 2015
This is a new term I’ve learned, and it means, rainy, cold, windy, and generally unpleasant outdoor conditions…. And that was what we had today.
I have neglected to mention that we had several lovely days with ShedMan and CheetahWoman…lots of laughing and good times. Today, however, that came to an end….
CheetahWoman had told us about a magical cemetery island she found in the River Snizort, and we were going right by, and so stopped in. Despite the rain and many cow-pies, we discovered a sliver of the magic she had observed in the fading light of day (no rain).
Given that it was in the high 40s (F) in the valleys, it’s not surprising that at elevated elevations, the precip was white. I think there’s new dusting atop remnant snowpack from last winter….
I really loved the narrow long chutes of water the mountains were shedding…. More a result of the rubbish weather….
In light rain (still rubbishy), we checked out the Caladonian Canal (along the Great Glen Fault), which we paralleled for part of the day….
We finished up our touristing with a quick visit to Old Inverlochy Castle, which is in pretty good shape for dating back to about 1280. This view is through both gates, all the way across the interior courtyard. It had round towers in each corner, and the wall bases and part of the walls remain outlining the exterior walls and towers. The huge rounded stones are different than in stonework we’ve seen so far.
Finishing a day of rubbish weather is uplifting….
We moved on from the morning’s rain
Sunday, 31 May 2015
Rainy morning kept us close to the coffee pot, then we mobilized for a “Sunday drive.”
We drove into sunshine and sea-views.
Our route took us to a ca. 1500s church (or it dated to then “originally”), no longer hosting sermons and serious talk. However, several important Jacobite and post-Jacobite MacLeods had themselves planted here…. The black stone of the knight-of-death is from their other home-island, Skye (as I understand it).
Several grave-markers in this church and church-yard used these symbols. I found it most difficult to get past the crossed long-bones (like femurs). Why did they bother me more than the skull-representations? No answer.
We moved beyond into the land of MaNature, and these tidal flat areas (if that is what they were), along with the shallows tinted by waterborn golden sands, captured my eye.
Another bay or so up the road, we found crashing surf and glorious blue waters near-shore….
Later, back at our ranchito-of-the-moment, we watched the light change over the mussel-ranchito-of-the-loch…and the moon rise above (not shown).
Lovely day!
Time changes (noun verb)
Saturday, 30 May 2015
We moved through the landscape like we were nudge-budging time.
We began with an unexpected tire event…on the OTHER rental car…. Some confusion on my part, as we both, that is each couple, arrived here in a white rental car…. After several attempts, I finally got straightened out…and permission was given for tire replacement/fixing to happen, using a nonspecified contractor…. Then we discovered that the tyre business we could find (TY, G__gle!) in these parts is closed Sat and Sun, so the next phase of the tire fixing event will happen Monday…. The “boys” installed the “real” spare, and the car is back safely in the driveway, awaiting the weekday opening….
Our first (scheduled) stop was this fantastic four-pointed array of standing stones with a circle of stones and even a burial cairn in the center. What we see today is the result of several hundred years of additions and modifications…. Plus agricultural use as late as fifty (I think) years ago, when this was a potato field (if I have it right).
For me, the space and place was magical in that this hilltop and the laboriously erected stones seemed like a place where peace reigned. My projection? Probably.
This magnificent circular structure dates perhaps a millennia closer to our own times, but still in the distant past. We read that no one knew the purpose of these huge circular buildings, and we also read about how it contained multiple levels of living spaces, likely used by several…families…. This broch (Friendly Autocorrect: plz don’t change it to broth again!) is huge and within the two-walled enclosure were steps and passages that permitted movement up and down, from level to level.
Very moving. Very different from the standing stones/stone circle….
We also visited a blackhouse village (that’s blackhouse not blockhouse, Friendly Autocorrect). The last residents moved out maybe in the 1950s(?), and about 15 yrs ago preservationists began to reconstruct and preserve this cluster of blackhouses. We found displays and people here extremely informative…but I neglected to discover the reason behind the naming…. I heard that previously there were white-houses, hence the name as the structures contrasted in some way. I also heard that the peat fires inside blackened the interiors. Mostly, I just absorbed what it might have been like to live in spaces with your sheep/cattle, to have a dirt floor in your house, and to nearly always have your nostrils filled with the scent of burning peat. My imagination may not match reality.
Adjacent to the blackhouse village was a rabbit village. [Rabbit is more central and in the fore-ground than sleeping lamb. Rabbit’s friends and relatives didn’t make this crop….]
Still trying to figure out the complexities of peat cutting and drying. From my limited understanding, this bunch of peats is in the first stage of the drying process, which may take at least six weeks and can be longer if it’s repeatedly rainy.
Very exciting day all around. Plus, we watched the moon above, and we have seen the loch in front of our rented cottage in the hinterlands become still-surfaced. Given the constancy of the wind, I was very surprised by this…nature-mirror…moment.
Not-mysteries and mysteries
Friday, 29 May 2015
Another day, another ferry ride to an island. NOT yawn! Spotted a much smaller craft sharing our waters….
Found a colorful lighthouse…at the end of the road in one direction.
And a sandy beach in a cove at the end of the road in another direction.
What better welcome to our new housing than this colorful presentation from the sky-deities!
This plant is foreign to me. Found in a marshy ditch, maybe a half-dozen others within several hundred meters. Haven’t spotted it elsewhere. Distinctive. Several of the leaves are damaged, perhaps by frost? The brown pineapple-y features are from this year, not carry-overs from last year’s flowering/fruiting….
IYLHYBHN (aka land…and sea)
Monday, 25 May 2015
If you lived here, you’d be home now.
Needs work.
Ready to occupy.
We also took a ferry. Not too much open water….
I was expecting the horn to blow at any moment. I’m in the corner because it was rather cool and windy.
The crew loaded those large trucks first. They had to back on, and did it like they’d done it dozens of times before. The crew cinched the trucks down with big chains. No chance they’d shift during passage! For most of the trip, we were serenaded by several car-alarm horns; clearly they had not been calibrated for sea-worthiness….