Catching up part two. Or the whole of 2018

2018 the first six months

2018 was a funny year for me, it started normally enough and continued right up until the summer when things went a bit wrong.
In February, the snowdrops started to arrive and spring appeared to be on the way.

During March we had two falls of snow, the first drifted, creating alternately deep drifts and clear ground.

Snowdrifts

Later a second fall simply fell straight down for hours and hours giving an even but deeper covering.

Deep and crisp and even

 Being retired, we could just hunker down and wait for it to go away, having made sure we had enough supplies for a week or so and so in each case we hardly ventured out. I was still going to my rehab classes and I was getting quite fit, only missing a couple of sessions, one because of the snow and another because of a clash in dates where we had an appointment.

A snowflake on the window, showing the the distinct six points

 For the next month, we had a heavy cloud and it became very dark for days on end, but this eventually changed and in May the sun reappeared and spring was well under way.

Spring returning

Badbury Clump

TBH's birthday is in May and it was a particularly sunny day so I suggested that we have a look at the bluebells in Badbury Clump, a small wood on top of Badbury Hill which is famous locally for the appearance of a field of bluebells in spring.

The sight of a field of bluebells under the trees attracts people every year. It was quite busy and the bluebells did not disappoint.

 It remained sunny and dry for several days and we discovered that a Miner bee had built a nest in one of our flower beds.

A mier bee building its nest.  Unusually above ground.

Mother bee with one of her offsprings

I watched it for several days but then one day it rained heavily and when I next looked, it seemed to have been washed away.

2018 Reunion 

In June, it was time for the annual reunion and this year it was in Scotland. Surprisingly, we are not getting any younger and driving all the way to Scotland in one go is becoming a bit too much for us, so we managed to arrange to stay at Barrow with The Daughter (TD) and family for a few days on the way up. This allowed us to have a break before continuing to Edinburgh where we were staying for the reunion. The Hotel was very new, rather ugly but rather posh inside, it was just near South Queensferry and we had had a short walk to the river where there were several restaurants down by the water front, right under the bridges.

South Queensferry is famous for being the nearest place to the famous Forth Bridge, which opened in 1890 and has been operational ever since. At one time it was famous for being painted constantly because it took so long to paint, the painters needed starting again as soon as it was finished, giving rise to the expression 'Like painting the Forth Bridge, to imply an endless process. Nowadays, the paint used will last for a number of years and so it does not require constant work.

Edinburgh is an interesting and unusual town. It is built on the side of a steep hill and so has several levels that have evolved over the centuries. As a result of this, some of the older dwellings are now underneath newer ones.

This view from the top of the hop on hop off bus shows the different street levels typical of central Edinburgh

Before a sense of social conscience kicked in it was common practice to simply demolish someone’s home either evicting them before or after and simply building over the top of the rubble. Not all homes like this were completely demolished, sometimes they were simply filled with rubble and then built over. This means that there are several ancient houses which have since been partially excavated and they can be viewed by going down to them. Mary Kings Close is one of these and we went to visit this one day during our stay. It was very interesting and rather spooky. One room still had the wallpaper on some of the walls dating back more than two hundred years.

In one house, the toilet was immediately opposite the front door. This was designed to show off the fact that the owner had an indoor loo by placing it where everyone could see it when the front door was opened.

Mary Kings Passage

 We had to book a time for that trip which was in the afternoon, so in the morning we went to visit the castle. This is of course on the top of the hill and a long way up from the place that the park and ride bus stop  had delivered us when we first arrived in town. So we had slogged our way up to the castle on foot and when we got there, we found it was absolutely heaving with tourists from all over the globe.

Edinburgh Castle

There are so many Japanese tourists some of the signs are written in Japanese

The Tattoo arena and entrance to the castle, looking small than it does on TV

The entrance to the castle is via the arena where they stage the Edinburgh Tattoo and they were getting it ready for that event.  What surprised us both, was that when it is shown on TV, the arena looks huge, in fact it was nothing like as large as it seems on the TV.

We struggled through to some of the more accessible areas of the castle but in the end decided we would leave and go for a trip on the hop on hop off bus. This was a nice change as we were beginning to feel that we had walked too far and we were quite tired. So we sat on the bus and did the tour, getting off at the nearest stop to the Scottish parliament buildings. There was a museum there called The Dynamic Earth where there was an educational display of geology.

The Dynamic Earth 

 We decided we did not have much time if we were to get to the Mary Kings Close in time and so returned to the hop on hop off bus in order to hop on again. This went wrong in two ways, first by this time a whole fleet of buses had arrived to collect a number of school children from the Dynamic Earth and there was now a bus jam of gigantic proportions which was preventing our bus from getting out of the circle where the buses park.

A bus jam

This eventually cleared enough for us to get going again, but the second thing we had not realised was that we had hopped onto the wrong bus and it did not go past the street we wanted to get to.

Not a problem according to the map, we were just a block away from the road we wanted.  Unfortunately owing to the topology of Edinburgh, this was a steep climb up from where we were, but there was a flight of steps leading up nearby and so we started to climb these. We were tired, but a flight of steps would not be too difficult.

A flight of steps, no problem

Up we went, but at the top of the flight of steps as we came around a corner, there was a second flight of steps that looked several times longer than the first. So by the time we got to the level we wanted we were pooped again.

Yet another flight of steps to climb

The Mary Kings Close is well below ground level, so there is a long flight of steps leading down, which was better than climbing up, but we were thinking that for every step down it meant another step up. Still, we survived and although tired, lived to see another day.

Mary Kings Passage

Whilst we were there, we went on two trips, one to see the Falkirk Wheel and the other to see the Kelpies. Both were worth the visit.

The Falkirk Wheel

An amazing feat of engineering

The first trip was to the Falkirk Wheel, a giant construction designed to lift and lower canal boats from one level to another with a minimum of electrical power. It is a modern construction, which effectively takes the place of a long flight of locks and rejoins two original canals that were built during the heyday of canal construction. The two levels are about 40 meters different and the whole thing is quite spectacular. It can only lift one boat up, whilst lowering a second boat, so it takes a little while to get through, but the alternative would be a flight of locks which would need a considerable amount of land to fit them all in.

One of the two tourist boats that simply go up and down on the wheel

Locks rely on a constant supply of water through them to fill and empty them, so a flight of normal locks would take water from the top canal. The wheel uses two huge containers that do not exchange water so, unlike a flight of locks, which can sometimes not have enough water in the dry season, the Falkirk Wheel is able to run even in the driest seasons when water is in short supply. TBH, does not like boats, so she remained in the visitor centre whilst I rode up in a canal barge.

The view from the barge at the top of the wheel

The tourist barges go up, move about a hundred yards up the upper canal, turn around and come down again, so it was not a very long wait for TBH.

The Kelpies

The River Forth alongside the Kelpies

Our next day out was much more TBH friendly. This was the trip to see the Kelpies. The name is familiar to me since one of my aunts had a dog that she had named Kelpie, but when I told the tour guide this, she was a bit put out, since she did not have a friendly view of the mythical kelpies of Scotland. She also seemed a bit annoyed that I actually knew what they were when she asked us at the start of the tour, because I think she was expecting all Sassenachs to be ignorant of Scottish myths.
Kelpies are a mythical shape shifting creature that lives in water and comes ashore in a form of something that humans would want, in order to catch them and eat them. Scottish tradition has it that they will take the form of the most handsome horses, since at the time of the origin of the myth, horses were hard currency. Once the victim was eaten, the kelpie would leave their liver on the water’s edge, since they could not eat a human liver.

The people at the foot of the sculptures gives you a sense of scale.  They are huge.

The statues that represent this myth are amazing, they are sculpted out of a host of irregular shaped metal plates on a gigantic frame and are perfect reproductions of the head and neck of two horses. The sculptor was Andy Scott, a fairly well known artist, who created them.  He used two Clydsdale horses, Duke and Baron, as models, which he captured perfectly.

The two horses, Duke and Baron used by Andy Scott as models for his sculptures

You are allowed inside the huge sculptures with the guide and inside there is a horseshoe worn by one of the horses.

A horseshoe from one of the two horses used as models

This view shows the interior structure.  Each metal plate is a different shape and size, making the whole sculpture an amazing three D jigsaw puzzle.

It is a spectacular piece of artwork and ticks all my boxes about what art is all about, unlike some things you see around that are just a bit of bent metal or whatever.

One of the meals we had whilst we were there was in the Three Bridges Hotel Restaurant , which is right down on the water front of Queensferry at a place I had stayed a few years earlier when working in an MOD site near Edinburgh.

The Three Bridges

 At sunset the three bridges were quite a sight in themselves, the original railway bridge, the old and new road bridges are worth seeing and were all visible from outside the restaurant.

Both road bridges, the old one nearest to us and the new one in the background

The original railway bridge

After a final meal in South Queensferry, we returned home via the family in Barrow.