Luckily it’s not yet raining. Three days of rain were predicted so we booked a caravan for the coming days on the Scottish borders. We’re happy to pack our tent dry and leave the beautiful Cairngorms National Park, the heather covered mountains and the river Dee, while the rain starts coming down from the grey clouds. We stop a few times to take in the views.
The first city we pass is Perth. There is a lot to do, but we’ll skip some things, Scone palace is closed for a private event. This is where Scottish Kings used to be crowned, the Perth Museum (displaying the stone of the Scone Throne where Scottish (and later Brittish) monarchs are sitting on when crowned, and much more.
But we do stop at Branklyn Garden, established in 1922 by Mr and Mrs Renton, who collected seeds of over 3.500 plants for their 0,8ha garden. The light rain paused. Zeno finally recognizes the rhododendron himself, which saved us many questions. There are also many well maintained rock gardens, and many more Asian looking flowers, plants and trees we’re not familiar with. We enjoy a tea in the tea house, with cute knitted warmers for the tea pots. A pity the heater is not on, as it’s only 15 degrees today, and still very wet.
Then we visit Perth city center, but only the St Johns Kirk, noted for being the site of John Knox’s 1559 sermon against idolatery, which began the Scottish Reformation. There’s not much to see, which is no surprise taking the reformation into account.
There are other castles nearby but the nicest one has a lunch break, so we try one of the others. Burleigh castle turns out to be a ruin along the road with no parking space. It seems oddly familiar.
We check the map and see that Loch Leven is just 8 minutes from here. That castle on an island we’ve seen before, so we probably also rode along Burleigh castle. We think the children will enjoy a boat trip, but sadly all trips are fully booked, so Tim flies back and forth before we get back on the road.
We cross the Forth with views on the magnificent Forth Bridge, Unesco world heritage site and voted Scotland’s greatest man made wonder. We follow the Forth a little upstream until we get to Blackness castle. It was a state prison and crown possession for most of its life. The exterior is impressive and clearly focused on defensiveness, the rooms were even made smaller to strenghten the walls. The interior is not interesting at all as it are all empty stone rooms without decoration to keep them apart. We’re not even sure if we have visited this castle too when we were touring here seven years ago.
It’s end of the afternoon and time to head to our caravan site. First we have to do our grocery shopping as the site is this remote that there isn’t a supermarket within 30 minutes of it. The car is filled to the brim and we head to the Scottish borders, it’s more scenic than we imagined but also far more remote. There is really nothing here, not even a small village or a random farm. It will be easy to relax here. When we near the supposed spot of our caravan park we start to wonder if we were scammed, there seems to be nothing here but trees. But it appears just as it should, we turn onto the park and Olga start to have another fear, as she sees the multiple moss covered caravans. The reception is abandoned but there is an envelop with our name on it, we follow the map and to our relief are led to a new caravan with decking. We unload our entire car, have dinner and relax.
