Spring Scotland and England, Part 3

The Big Stones

On our trips to Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales we’ve visited scores of cairns, stone circles, and standing stones.  I’ve written articles on the “Stones of Isle Arran” for Historic Scotland Magazine (see the last chapter of Ten Years of Travel in Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales [shameless commercial plug]). But two of the most impressive sites we’ve seen are Stonehenge and Avebury stone circle, and we’ve seen them twice.

Stonehenge, 

located a few miles from Amesbury village on the Salisbury Plains, is a World Heritage site.  The stone circle and henge (circular mound) are from the Neolithic period (New Stone Age) and date to between 3000 and 2000 BCE. 

The stones in the circle, some coming from as far as 250 miles away in Wales, are up to 30 feet tall and weigh 25 tons.  Built in phases, Stonehenge is associated with burials (cremated human remains were found) and astronomical alignments.  The circle was roped off to visitors in 1977 because of erosion and damage to the stones.  

The 16' Heel Stone leans towards the circle.

We noticed on this last visit that the ropes keep people even further back than a few years ago.  Even on a crowded mid-day, though, I could still get angles and views of the stones with no people in them--all it takes is a little patience.  Some people believe that Stonehenge loses some of its mysticism by not being able to get up close and personal.  I believe just the opposite.  Having to stay back from the circle allows visitors unobstructed views of the entire circle, and its elusiveness makes the stones even more mystical.  

Seventeen miles north of Stonehenge is Avebury village, Wiltshire, with its massive three-quarter mile around stone circle, 

the Avebury Stone Circle.  Also a World Heritage site, Avebury dates to about 2600 BCE but isn’t as sculpted as Stonehenge.  Probably used for ritualistic purposes, Avebury is far more spread out and visitors can get right up to the stones.  

People often believe that that these stone circles and others were the work of Druid priest for their rituals including human sacrifice.  Not true.  

The earliest account of Druids dates back to only 200 BCE.  By the time of the Druids both Stonehenge and Avebury circles would have long since been abandoned.  Certainly, Druid priests may have used the circles, but they were definitely not the creators.  

On this trip we also visited another set of stones we’d visited before.  This set of stones is quite different from Stonehenge or Avebury.  

The Aberlemno Pictish stones, located about six miles NE of Forfar in Angus, Scotland, are early Medieval (mid-9th century) standing stones with a  variety of carvings and designs on them.  The Picts, known to the Romans as barbarians or “Painted People,” were Caledonian tribes of people living north of Hadrian’s Wall. 

The Irish called them the Cruithi, “People of the Design,” for their art work, mostly carved on the stones.  The Aberlemno stones, a series of four stones all over 6 feet tall, are located in the local churchyard and along the road leading into the village of Aberlemno.  The stones, although in places quite weathered, 

show a variety of Pictish images and the stone in the churchyard depicts a famous Pictish battle.  More of the Pictish stones can be seen at the small Historic Scotland 

Pictish stones in the Meigle Museum.

run museum in Miegle a few miles away.

Ancient stone circles, standing stones, Pictish stones, and cairns are all grand reasons to visit the early sites maintained by Historic Scotland, English Heritage, and the Welsh counterpart, Cadw.

Trip Summary

Our spring 2013 trip to Scotland and England had highlights and lowlights.  Among the lowest of the lowlights was a brand new Garmin GPS (Sat Nav to the Scots) which half the time took us the strangest ways to our destinations--see the May 16 post.  A second lowlight was some of the worst weather we’ve had on our spring trips, including the coldest spring in the UK in the last 30 years. 

Mountains of Glencoe.

 Although those aspects of the trip will be good stories, it will be the highlights which we will remember.  Statistically the trip breaks down like this:

Car: VW Golf TSi driven 3500 miles, 30-35 miles/gallon
          £1.35 per litre = £5.40 gallon = with exchange rate ~ $9.00
         Do the maths.

Golf:

16 rounds in five weeks, 236 holes, 63 miles walked on courses.

Stirling GC seen from Stirling Castle.

11 different courses, 3 links, 2 moorland, 6 parkland.

None of the courses were new to us..

In our competitions Anne won 6 matches, I won 5, and 2 were tied

Anne putting at Crail Balcombie, one of the few matches she lost.

Anne’s and my favorite course played was Crail Balcombie on Fife, with Carnoustie a close second.

Eateries:

13 pubs, 14 restaurants, 14 tearooms or coffee shops.

Latte in the Watermill Tearoom and Bakery, in Blair Atholl.

23 new to us.

We both agree that our favorite was dinner at the Greyhound Inn in Staple Fitzpaine 

The Greyhound Inn

with second going to The Old Stocks in Stow-on-the-Wold.  Probably beating everything, though, was the breakfasts put on by The Blue Seas Hotel in Penzance--unbelievable!

Attractions: 

75% of what we did or saw was new to us.

13 villages, 

Mousehole (mowz-ole) Harbour

2 shopping venues, 

Just arrived in Scotland and she's already shopping in Linlithgow.

10 nature sites, 2 gardens, 

Himalayan Blue Poppies at Branklyn Garden in Perth.

9 religious sites (cathedrals, abbeys, churches), 

Truro Cathedral, Truro, Devon.

3 castles, 5 historic sites (for lack of other classification), 1 lighthouse, 1 industrial site, and 8 ancient sites.

In one of the houses at Carn Euny, a Neolithic village in Cornwall.

Anne’s favorites include St Michael’s Mount, 

Repair work at St Michael's.

Minack Theatre, Tintagel Castle, and Dartmoor.  For me the day on Dartmoor couldn’t be beat, although I liked all the other things we did.

Whisky:

No distilleries this trip, poor planning on my part.

2 drank on the trip: Glen Scotia 12 year old, Arran Machrie Moor.

2 brought home: Carn Mor Arran 15 year old, Mackinlay’s blended 1907 Antarctic. 

Business:

3 photos sold at Red Squirrel Gallery and Merlindale.

14 books sold at Red Squirrel Gallery, Merlindale, and out of our car boot.

Most Unique:

A 23 hour layover in Amsterdam which allowed us to at least explore a little of the city.

Amsterdam tour boat.

For more photos from the trip, go Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/53918452@N00/sets/72157634184770097/
where I've posted a new set

Next: There will be more to share about our spring visit to the UK, as well as some summer adventures, but I’m already starting to work on our fall visit to the UK.  Ah, the life of a traveller.

To the South, To England (Part 2)

I Ain’t ‘Fraid of No Ghosts.  Most of the tourist shops in southern England sold small books about local ghosts (ie., the Ghosts of Dartmoor, Southern Ghost Stories, etc.).  I also have a book I’d been reading at home before the trip called “Britain’s Most Haunted Pubs and Inns.”  This led me to start asking at the pubs and inns we visited if there were any local spooks.  

In Staple Fitzpaine near Taunton in Somerset we stayed at the Greyhound Inn which has been a coaching house and inn since the 1700s.  

Greyhound Inn, Staple Fitzpaine, Somerset

A great steak dinner

While visiting with the landlord I jokingly asked if there were any local ghosts we could visit with.  He said that while he’d never felt a presence, the kitchen staff say that sometimes they feel someone else is in the room with them when no one is about.  He also said that a burly Irishman had stayed one night a couple years before.  In the morning when he was asked how he’d slept, the Irishman replied, “I barely slept at all.  I woke up in the middle of the night with hands around my neck and no one was there.”  The landlord didn’t know if the Irishman had had a supernatural experience or just too many pints the night before.  

Our next opportunity came at The Dolphin Inn in Penzance, Cornwall.  

The Dolphin Inn

We picked out this pub because of its very nice menu and reputation for food, as well as its reputation as a quite haunted inn. At least three ghosts haunt the inn: the old retired ship’s captain, a young man who had committed suicide in the pub, and an elder lady who wanders amongst the upstairs rooms.  We had a pint one night and a meal the next and never did see any of the resident spirits except the ones in our pints of cider.

On our exploration of Dartmoor National Park in Devon we were told by a visitor’s centre docent to stop by the Warren House, the third highest inn in England.  

The Warren House, Third Highest Inn in England

It was quite foggy on the moor, very atmospheric, so the Warren House pub was a lovely stop with its welcoming fire (which has been going for almost 200 years).  The landlord here was very chatty and when I asked about ghosts he said he wasn’t sure if the inn was haunted or not.  

Landlord of the Warren House

 He then proceeded to tell us that there were certain places in the pub house that dogs wouldn’t set foot, that the kitchen staff had seen fleeting images outside the kitchen when no was there, and that a publican had once been murdered behind the bar, but he wasn’t convinced their spirits still roamed the house.  Even when we went back for dinner later in the day, we still didn’t find any evidence of ghosts, just friendly locals enjoying Sunday dinner.

Our last spooky place is considered the most haunted pub in England. The Red Lion in Avebury in Wiltshire is indeed special.  

Avebury Stone Circle

The inn is in the middle of the largest ancient stone circle in the world.  The Avebury circle, about 30 miles north of Stonehenge, is three-quarters of a mile around and consists of scores of very large stones.  

The Red Lion Pub has numerous eating areas as well as five resident ghosts.  The staff have also reported seeing a phantom horse drawn carriage pull into the inn at night and hearing the ghostly clattering of hooves in the courtyard outside the pub. 

Though Prince Charles has eaten several times in the pub, not even his presence had brought any of the spirits to seek a Royal audience.  

Although we weren’t successful in finding any evidence of real phantoms (now there’s an oxymoron for you), we did enjoyed the search for English ghosts.  

The Moors.  Our trip to the south shires of England took us through or around several of  the famed English moors--areas of grasslands, heathers, fern, and stone, usually quite desolate,foreboding, and very Hound of the Baskervillean, except that they were all full of walkers or trekkers.  Exmoor in Somerset and North Devon was disappointing.  It was mostly stonewall-fenced farmland hidden behind tall hedges (see the last blog post).  On the way from Penzance (Cornwall) to Tavistock (Devon) we got into more typical moorland on Bodmin Moor.  After quite a drive along the southern England coast it was pleasant, even in light rain, to walk a half mile out to Hurler’s stone circle, 

Hurlers' Stone Circle on Bodmin Moor

one of the more ancient of the Neolithic circles.  A much less strenuous 50 foot walk was needed to see Trethevy Quoit (aka. the Giant’s House) 

with its 12 foot long top stone, a form of burial chamber we’ve seen more in Ireland where they are called dolmens.  

It was Dartmoor though where we got the real moorland experience, complete with heavy fog and swirling mists.  

Anne walking in the moors

A Tor, a naturally sculpted rock outcropping in the moors

We drove from our rather forgetable Mallards B&B in Tavistock to the main Dartmoor National Park Visitors’ Centre in Princetown, where we got suggestions for what to see on our one day visit to the park.  First on the list was the Warren House, a great inn in the heart of the moors.  

The Warren House, Dartmoor

Then, after coffee, a flapjack (a sweet homemade oat biscuit), and some conversation, we stopped to see a clapper bridge (a stone bridge over a stream or river) in Postbridge.  

Luck was with us as we had the bridge to ourselves for a few minutes before a bus of tourists arrived to swarm the bridge and get into each others’ photos.  

Anne in one of the stone huts at Grimspound, Dartmoor

It was about three miles from Postbridge to the turnoff to the trailhead of the hike up to Grimspound, a low stonewall encircled Bronze Age settlement of 24 stone huts dating to 1300 BC.  For a break from the foggy moors we drove down a horrendously small road to the village of Buckfast and a visit to Buckfast Abbey, 

an active working monastery. 

In the abbey church I visited with Father Christopher who knew about the Mt Angel Abbey and the Benedictine Assisted Living Center where my mother is getting well cared for.  After the dry weather of the abbey we headed back into the moors to find either stone circles or remains of stone huts (I couldn’t be sure which) 

before again visiting Warren House for a good dinner.  One interesting note about dinner at the inn was that while in the morning the specials board had listed a special of Sunday roast, by mid-afternoon the roast had been replaced with a different special.  As we ate we watched the bar staff change the specials three more times--either they were one-of-a-kind or they were yesterday’s left-overs.  Lastly, we wanted to see a second ancient village with a unique stone row feature.  

We started out past the wild Dartmoor ponies, but soon were turned back by fog so thick we were afraid of getting lost on the trackless moor.

Although the villages of southern England, such as St Ives (made famous by the Doc Martin TV series) and Mousehole, 

Mousehole harbor, a few miles from Penzance, Cornwall

were picturesque, I much more enjoyed traipsing around Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor.

At the Theatre.  A Rick Steves’ travel show turned us on to the open-air Minack Theatre at Porthcumo about four miles from Land’s End in Cornwall.  We booked from home an evening  performance of a Cornish Celtic Folk Group at the theatre and were looking forward to the music and to seeing the venue.  When the weather on performance day turned nasty with 40 mile an hour winds and heavy rain, we decided to visit the theatre during the day knowing that the evening performance would be cancelled.  

The hand-built rock amphitheater is the dream child of Rowena Cade, who used her back garden to stage a local production of The Tempest in 1932.  Her work and that of a faithful gardener produced a dramatic seaside theatre which today hosts 17 plays in a season running from June through September and seen by 80,000 theatre-goers in a typical year.  

As we toured the theatre in high wind and driving rain we were told that the performance would probably not be cancelled--evidently the group would perform for anyone silly enough to sit out on grass or stone seats in 40 degree wind-blown rain.  We were not in attendance, but the theatre is still a highlight of our trip.  

Next: More highlights from England and Scotland and our trip summary--all written from home.