Castles Close to Home

I took my sister and brother-in-law to the airport last weekend, , but we couldn't resist a few last visits to castles on the way. This time, we took Leah along and left Emma and John at home. We started with a lovely breakfast at Balgove Larder in St. Andrews, which is a farm shop and tea room with fabulous scones and coffee, to give our visitors one last chance at a full Scottish breakfast. Then we hit the road and drove to Loch Leven for a visit to the castle where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned for over a year after she was forced to abdicate the throne.

Loch Leven castle from the mainland. The yellow flowers in front are rapeseed,
and they are in bloom absolutely everywhere in Scotland. Beautiful!

When we presented our tickets and reserved a spot on the wee boat that was going to ferry us across the loch to the castle, the Historic Scotland representative asked us if we minded a few loch flies. He said the first "hatching" of flies had just occurred, so we may encounter a few on our travels. We assured him we were tough...since loch flies aren't the biting midges that Scots call "wee beasties," we figured, "How bad can it be?" Twenty minutes later, as we disembarked from the small motor boat onto the island, we realized that it was bad indeed. We started by commenting on the sheer number of flies, then laughed as they got tangled in our hair and stuck to our eyelashes. We quickly learned to keep our mouths closed shut, though, as we noticed that some of them were even getting stuck in our teeth! Leah found a stick, and traveled throughout the castle by waving it in front of her face. That caused just as much of a hazard as the flies, so we made it a very quick visit!

Leah trying to fend off the midges with a stick!

We also stopped at Blackness Castle, which was a military fortree just outside Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth, and then Linlithgow Palace a few miles up the road, which was a place of decoration and leisure for the Mary Queen of Scots crowd. Leah was quite castled-out at this point, and I could tell she was a bit relieved when we collapsed into a booth at a pub down the lane from the Palace.

Guarding the doors at Linlithgow Palace

The next day, Emma and Leah and I toured a few more castles. We stopped at Kellie Castle, which is very close to St. Andrews. It’s in wonderful condition, and fully furnished, with a lovely set of nursery rooms full of antique toys and dolls. The folks who run the castle gave Leah a photo trail as we entered, and so she was busy looking for certain items in each room as we walked through the castle…a tradition that most castles uphold and that provides great incentive to press on when the toddler has grown weary of furniture and portraits and elaborate ceilings.  At the end, we traded the completed photo trail for a wee bit of chocolate, and that bought us a quick tour of the castle’s lovely gardens. As soon as the chocolate ran out, Leah was pretty much done too, though we did convince her to stop at the castle’s adventure playground for a few minutes.

We also stopped at Stirling Castle, since Historic Scotland was hosting a Scottish fashion show in the afternoon. The show was put on by a local design school, and in addition to the traditional runway show, they had a series of hands-on activites and workshops for kids throughout the castle. Emma and Leah took advantage of the huge collection of historic costumes the students had brought with them, and they assembled a few outfits for themselves. They also created a small puppet for Leah to take home, out of scraps of fabric and other bits and bobs. There was a hair braiding demonstration too, but Emma wasn’t interested since she can braid her own hair very well, and thankfully Leah was content just to watch for a few minutes, rather than to volunteer her head of hair. I was kind of glad, since her zig-zag ear-to-ear scar from her craniosynostosis surgeries can be a bit off-putting to people who don’t know her story, and I didn’t want to get into the whole discussion with the poor student that ended up braiding her hair!