We Made It to the Big City

Lovely breakfast at Jackie's B&B free range eggs scrambled with salmon.

We chatted with a couple who were in from New Castle visiting their family in Perth. Peter asked about what happened to the sheep when they were too old..did they become dog/cat food? The wife had a friend who is a sheep farmer and told us that the male lambs are used for meat and the females are used to breed. The price of wool right now has fallen and they don't even try to sell the wool anymore. The bailed straw that we have seen in the fields is used in the winter is used for bedding, especialy for the lambing season. After a day, they release the small lambs back to the field with little plastic raincoats to keep them from getting a cold. The image of little sheep running around in raincoats is priceless!

Then off on the road for Sterling planning on visiting the castle. But just a few miles down the road, Diane spotted the sign for St Serfs church and the Dupplin cross hat she had read about but forgot to look up before we left in the morning and off we went passing the funky cross by the side of the road with "Maggie Wall burnt here as a witch 1657" on the way.

At the church, the Historic Scotland Guide was from Croatioa and very informative. She gave us a great tour all part of our yearly membershipt to the Historical Society. The cross itself was very impressive with wonderful carvings on both sides as well as on the edges. She also mentioned that today was the last day for the Celtic exhibit at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh [ http://www.edinburghspotlight.com/2016/03/exhib…] and that the little church up the street in Fortevoit where the Dupplin cross [ http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/dunning/s…] was originally located before moved to here, was quite nice also for a quick visit.

So much for the orignal plan for the day!

Up the street at the next town of Fortevoit where we met a middle-aged stone cutter who was cutting sandstone panels with Pictish symbols as a demonstration at the church. He has just received a grant to construct a new stone cross with Pictish symbols for village center. In the church there are pieces of other crosses that they have found in the local areas. The assumption is that there were 3 or 4 other complete crosses bounding the area of a major Pictish chief kingdom, but all that is left now are a few pieces. They recently have found a major wood hendge in the area as well [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forteviot_Bronz…] . Their whole concept of the area is changing with this new information.

Then off we went going straight to Edinburgh, bypassing for now Sterling in order to get to the Celtic exhibit. We were a bit concerned driving into town early afternoon after someone had told us about a lot of road construction. Crossing the Firth of Forth,we had quite a bit of construction, but doing it at 1:30 in the afternoon before folks returned from the weekend, was probably a good idea. We opted to drive straight to the museum and to try to find parking there instead of going first to the B&B and taking the bus back into town. Little did we know that there was a lot of "it's still warm a s sunny" celbrations going on. There was more construction downtown as well and after a couple of unfortunately turns, Peter ended up on High Street at a road closure and we needed to backtrack. Whew! We finally successfully parked and made our way to the museum.

We spent 3 hours rambling through the exhbit that contained various pieces of Celtic artwork from Syria to Ireland. Very interesting to contrast and compare with what we saw in Ireland at the archeological museum in Dublin. Glad we changed our plans to be able to see it. The Museum itself is quite interesting. The building must be some type of world exhibit and is very beautiful.

We went across the street to the Greyfriar's pub for a quick bite. Peter was able to give "Bobby" [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_Bobby] a pet for good luck (suppose to be an recent urban legand made up by a tour company) just in case before driving again to find the B&B. On the way there we passed by the Bedlam Church...couldn't pass up a picture.Read more