Sunshine and Snowdrops

On Saturday, David and John took Leah to the park while Emma and I went into town. We told the boys we were going to run some errands, but when we left the house our first stop was a wee tea room in town called Gorgeous. Emma stops there with her school friends for lunch because they have student specials at lunchtime and an incredibly efficient system of bringing in a large number of students in a short period of time. It’s a welcome change from the many stores that either close during the Madras College lunch hour (even some restaurants!), and those that have a “No More than 4 Pupils in the Store at One Time” sign taped to the front window.

Emma loves their lentil soup, but she has never been upstairs to the tea room itself, so we made that our first stop for a light lunch. We both had paninis and tea, and though my melted brie and streaky bacon topped with tomato chutney was good, the chutney tasted faintly like ketchup to me, so I couldn’t quite finish mine. Emma’s was better, and I was glad to give her a chance to have a lunch out that wasn’t geared towards the toddler set.

On Sunday after church, we drove 10 miles down the East Neuk coast to the little village of Kingsbarn. There’s an estate there called Cambo, with a country house that is used as a B&B and lovely gardens that are a bit of a tourist attraction in their own right. The estate has been in the Erskine family since 1688 and is still owned by Sir Peter and Lady Catherine Erskine, though the house on the grounds is actually newer than ours in Hamilton. Each February, the estate capitalizes on the popularity of the galanthus, or the snowdrop, a small perennial that grows from a bulb and naturalizes easily, and therefore creates a white carpet in the woods wherever they are planted. Scots love them because they appear at just the moment in late winter when everyone here has had enough of the brown, brown and more brown and are craving a bit of spring growth at last. There’s even a national Snowdrop Festival here in Scotland each year, with estates and castles throughout the country planting them en masse and calling it an event. They aren’t terribly popular in Upstate New York, probably because they wouldn’t have too much of a visual impact against all the white snow, but they do work well here.

We arrived at Cambo and picked up a map of the walled gardens and the woodland walk, and set off. There’s a trail for kids called the ‘mystical glingbobs and tootflits’ that we attempted to follow because we thought it would be entertaining for Leah. I’m not actually sure if we ever did encounter a ‘glingbob’ or a ‘tootflit’ because I’m not quite sure what they are, but we did see some piglets and a waterfall, and we came upon a few small sculpture-y things along the path that seemed to be sized for kids, so all in all it was a success. I loved the walled garden though nothing was in bloom because it had been planted with grasses and red twig dogwood that provided a contrast against the stone wall. Clearly, the gardener here knew what she was doing! Through the whole tour Leah was a trooper, though the path was a bit long for her and she was clearly running out of steam by the time we neared the car park. We intended to finish off with a quick look at the sea on the other side of the car park, but David was carrying her at this point and neither of them were looking too chipper.  We put her in the car and assumed she would fall asleep on the way home because she had missed her nap. However, she was desperate to resist falling asleep, and instead spent the entire ride home insisting repeatedly, “I want chicken! I want chicken!”