Last weekend before Easter, we continued our tour of Scotland with a quick overnight to New Lanark, which is a small restored cotton mill on the Falls of Clyde that was developed by Robert Owens, who was a philanthropist and social reformer. Owens built housing for his mill workers, and provided an early form of health care and free education to all the children in New Lanark. He also started the world’s first nursery school for the “wee ones” of his millworkers. During his time, the mill was often visited
by European statesmen as a model for a healthy industrial environment with a vibrant and happy workforce. Still, the visitor center showed that working in the mill was not easy, and the tour was “led” by a 10 year old girl named Annie who worked ten hours a day, six days a week crawling under the noisy and dusty cotton thread machines to pick up stray balls of cotton. The tour of the village included a look into the school house, the company-owned general store, and a typical worker’s home, as well as the home of Robert Owens (which I especially found fascinating, since he left Scotland eventually and moved to Indiana to start another utopian community in New Harmony…not far from my hometown.) The visitor center was well done and the kids had a great time there, especially since John had remembered to bring his bouncy ball with him, and had also met a little boy from Glasgow at the hostel the night before (a “Glaswegian”…which is still hard for me to say with a straight face!) who walked around the site with us and his family. Overall the visit was a bit of a letdown however: it was pouring rain on Saturday, which put a damper on our planned hike along the “world-famous Falls of Clyde,” which turned out to be nothing more than a speedy creek meandering over a few boulders, despite the rain. David kept trying out new mottos for the village as we walked: “New Lanark: Now You Know Why Nobody Visits Southern Scotland.”
On the way home, we visited some of the sites associated with Mary Queen of Scots and her family. We started at Loch Leven Castle, which was built around 1300 and where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned for almost a year and forced to abdicate the throne (she apparently escaped by charming one of the other castle inhabitants to row her across the loch on a boat…). When we arrived, we were a bit surprised that she wasn’t able to escape earlier, since the small island with the castle wasn’t really far at all from the shore. The guy who was at the helm of the tiny motor boat that took us across to the island explained, however, that the water level in the loch had gone down quite a bit over the last few hundred years, so it was actually a much greater distance at the time of her imprisonment (and we also later learned that she was quite sick
during most of her imprisonment anyway, so probably wasn’t up for a lengthy dip in freezing cold Scottish loch water!) In any case, Loch Leven is a beautiful spot, and we had heard much about it since we have been in Scotland. Unfortunately, on the island, we also encountered something else we had heard much about since our arrival: midges! Midges (called “wee beasties” by the locals…) are like gnats, except they bite. They don’t usually come out until June, so we had hoped to avoid them, but this winter and spring has been much warmer than usual, so it looks like they are going to make an early appearance this year. There are many ways to avoid midges (staying in the sun, wearing beekeeper-style hats with nets on them, or even using a calor-gas driven machine that puts out a bovine scent and attracts them away from your garden party). Also, midges can’t fly as fast as we can walk, so as long as you’re on the move, you won’t be bothered by them. But the group of teenage girls trying to have a picnic in the shade of the castle right next to the loch were having no luck in avoiding them, and we stood on the castle walls and watched them furtively windmilling their arms for a while in an effort to shoo them off, then give up and pack up their toasties to have lunch on higher and sunnier ground. It was quite fun to watch, but we stayed for only a minute, until John tossed his bouncy ball into a patch of nettles alongside the castle, and David had to leave to venture into the woods after it.
We also stopped at Linlithgow Palace, which was built by King James I for Scottish royalty and is where Mary Queen of Scots was born. King James actually just rebuilt in, using a 12th century royal manor, but he did quite a job! Or I should say his stonemasons did quite a job—I’m assuming he had very little to do with the actual work. James III, James IV and James V added to the palace as well, and James V’s French wife, Mary of Guise, was supposedly very fond of the place. She compared the palace to the finest of chateaux in France (and we all know that if the French compare one thing to something French, that means quite a lot!) and she spent quite a bit of time there (likely why her daughter Mary was born there eventually—she couldn’t give birth in a castle that looked Scottish, for heaven’s sake!). Though the palace is in ruins now, it’s quite well preserved, and though it is missing its roof, one can still get a good sense of what it must have looked like in the 15th and 16th centuries. The palace included elaborate royal suites and great halls, two levels of kitchens with wine cellars (one of which is just below the King’s
bedroom so he could keep an eye on who went in and who went out carrying what…), a larder and an alehouse, a courtyard with an ornate fountain in the center, and large towers on each of the four corners. The Historic Scotland tour guide that met us at the door explained that the Stuarts used the palace for royal gatherings and parties, and it was clear why. The various Jameses and Marys were obviously quite creative in the design and construction of a party palace (thankfully more so than they were in choosing baby names!). Emma loved the palace and wanted to tour every room, which was quite a feat because the palace is large and quite maze-like and features many nooks and crannies, but John just wanted to bounce that bouncy ball off all the walls in the great room (you know, I really hate that ball…but it has been lost and retrieved so many times on this trip that we have way too much invested in it to give up on it now!). He persisted (bouncing it off this wall, then that wall, then this wall again, higher and higher each time until it hit a stone at a funny angle and skittered sideways down a spiral staircase or out a turret window and had to be rescued) until David lost patience with him, then the two of them retreated to the lawn outside to play football. After Emma and I had climbed each turret and descended each and every cellar stair, we joined them outside for a quick tour of St. Michael’s church next door, then a quick hike down the hill to the high street for some cappuccino and strawberry ice cream!
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