(click on any of the pictures for a larger version)
Monday morning we finally got to Edinburgh Castle. It was a fascinating visit. There's been some structure on that spot for about a millennium, if I remember right, and the castle was used for a very long time.
Here's the castle from below:
And Matt and I standing in front of the castle:
Here are some shots of various buildings in the castle. That third one has a "1615" in gold--that's when it was built. The last building is now a memorial to all the Scots who died in World War I.
This is St. Margaret's chapel; built in the 1100s, it's the oldest
surviving building in the castle. It's very tiny, and the doorway
is a reminder that people used to be a lot shorter than they are today.
This was one of my favorite bits: it's a cemetery for officers' dogs.
A few shots of the New Town (which was built in the 1700s; Scots have a very different definition of "new"
from Americans) from the castle:
Matt standing on a parapet:
And a few random shots. The last one is a cafe that I kept ducking into
to get out of the wind. I had a cup of hot cocoa at one point.
After the castle, we had lunch at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. Their food was good, and Matt enjoyed the Scotch. They did have a tremendous number of whiskies. I just didn't care. Matt stuck around after lunch and took their tour; I headed over to St. Giles church, where John Knox preached in 1559. It's amazing how quickly Scotland converted to Protestantism, and I can't help thinking they would have been in better shape if it had been a little more gradual. I'm always stunned to realize how many of Britain's conflicts have to do with religion.
We met up later that
afternoon at the Museum of Scotland. I had about
an hour there to browse through the history section, and it was a good
brush-up. Matt got there just in time to see the Millennium Clock
chime; I missed it. Here's the clock; apparently it was quite
something when it was moving.
On the way back, we decided to stop in at a pub on the way to the hotel for a quick drink. We got to talking to some of the locals, and it turned into several not-so-quick drinks. They were a lot of fun, and they gave us lots of advice about what to do with the rest of the trip. We also got invited to Quiz Night, except that we weren't going to be in Edinburgh at that point. For dinner we went to The Khukuri, a Nepalese restaurant one of them told us about--neither of us had had Nepalese before, but it turned out to be really good. After dinner we staggered back to the hotel and fell into bed.
The next day it was time to leave Edinburgh, which meant, unfortunately, that we had to drive. We packed up, checked out and got in the car and tried to get out of the city. This time, at least, we had an excellent map. Unfortunately, driving in the city was still a terror, and we still managed to take wrong turns a couple times. After a very tense 15 minutes or so, we were out of the city and into the suburbs, and we breathed a sigh of relief.
Our next stop was Rosslyn Chapel, which is in Roslin, about 7 miles outside of Edinburgh. Tuesday morning we had found a little place for breakfast, and someone there was reading the Daily Mail, whose headline had to do with Tom Hanks being in the country to shoot The DaVinci Code. It turned out, of course, that they were going to be shooting at Rosslyn--luckily, not until the week after we were there. I had honestly forgotten that Rosslyn was part of that book--I read it, but it didn't stick with me much.
Seeing the chapel, I can see how it would be a conspiracy theorist's dream. The person who had it built (starting in 1446), William Sinclair, was a Freemason, and possibly a member of the Knights Templar, if you believe that they survived in Scotland after they were banned in France in the 1300s. The entire chapel is covered with stone carvings, and there's all sorts of symbolism. It's pretty amazing.
This page contains an article from the Scotsman claiming that the Knight Templar theory is bunk. I have no idea.
Here are a few pictures of the chapel interior, to give you an idea:
And here are some of the carvings. There's a lot of Crusades imagery, and a lot of Mason symbolism. This first picture is one of the Green Man carvings--there are several of them, and some other pagan images.
