Summer!

Well, the Beltane Festival is over, and it must have been a historic event this year as we had a whole seven days without rain spoiling the proceedings!   The dry spell has gone on longer than that though, and we have been enjoying lovely sunny days with blue skies and WARMTH!  It makes up for the long long winter we had.  The last couple of days have seen rain and strong gusts of wind, but with sunny intervals, so it’s really very pleasant.  A really good downpour every now and then  really would be good for the gardens, but we want the sun during the day!  It can rain at night.

On Monday evening,  last week, Morag and I walked the three bridges path.  

 

 

It was so pretty with all the wild flowers and grasses growing along the banks of the river, and reflections in the water.  Summer in Scotland can be really beautiful.

Anyway on Friday I went with the U3A gardening group on a trip to Alnwick Garden in Northumberland in the north of England.  It took a couple of hours to get there in the community minibus, with a stop at Kelso for a cup of tea and time to stretch legs.

We arrived in the old and historic town, passing by the castle, and circled its walls to arrive at the gardens.  There has been a succession of gardens on this site for around 200 years, but after the second world war, when the garden had been used to grow produce, it fell into disuse, until a vision of the present Duchess of Northumberland saw it rise again, like the proverbial phoenix!  There are several small gardens comprising the whole thing, and more are still to come.  However the main feature is a wonderful cascade sending tons of water downhill through several pools, and every half hour sending plumes and arches of water up into the air.

The kids are waiting on the bridge because they know what is going to happen next….. Spouts of water shoot up suddenly to fall in the pool below the bridge and soak anyone who happens to be on the bridge at the time.  There are shrieks and yells as the kids run the gauntlet of the water!  Water play and getting wet is very much encouraged in the garden.  At the foot of the falls, little children can play in mini diggers, collecting water in the buckets and emptying it over the paved area or into the ditches that catch the water from where it is pumped back up hill to cascade down once more.  From the top of this huge water feature you can look over to the pavilion where you can sit at an outdoor table and watch the fun with a drink and something to eat.

Behind me at the top of the hill are the steps to the Venetian gates that lead to the flower garden.  A huge pool in the centre of the garden seems to be the starting point for lots of little cobbled rills that flow from one pool to another  I expect it would be rather nice to take your shoes off and enjoy the cooling water.  Kids were already having fun doing just that and splashing around in the water, while adults walked around admiring the flowers, or sometimes lingered a while on a bench in the shade of a pretty rose bower.

As for the roses… they were stunning. Pink, white, yellow, peach, I don’t know their names. Maybe you will have an idea, so take a look at these!

 

 

 

 

The centre of this rose looks like a bright light….

 

 

 

 

while somehow,  these apricot coloured ones remind me of the fluffy ginger cats with the flat squashed-look faces.

I’d like these clambering up the front of my house!

Of course there were other flowers too, offering their beautiful rich colours to the visitors.

 

 

 

 

I love these geraniums.  They’d really brighten up my garden.  I must remember to look for them at a garden centre shop! And these are nice as well.   I wish I knew or even remembered the names of some of these plants!

 

 

 

 

 

  And so to the tree house!!  Quite the biggest I have ever seen, containing a cafe bar and a restaurant, as well as an exhibition room, and having lots of decking walkways  and wobbly bridges through the branches which the kids all loved!

Alnwick Garden is somewhere I just have to go back to!  I haven’t seen all of it yet, as there’s the Poison Garden to see  – it was too hot for a guided tour -  and the Serpent Garden, another watery garden.  I was able to look down on the  Poison Garden as the guide showed various plants that had to have special licences to be grown, and explained about drugs of one sort of another.  This garden is kept locked between tours!

So maybe next time there will be more development underway.  There are certainly plans for more – a sensory garden that you will explore blindfolded being one that sounds interesting!    Well done to the Duchess for being inspired!

Talk again soon.

Beltane

I was going to start off with “It’s that time of year again!” but it’s been and gone now!  Being with Eunice, Keith and Ken in Moffat meant that we missed seeing the Wednesday night ride-out round the boundaries of the town, and the cavalcade of horsemen and women crossing the ford at Haylodge Park, following the Cornet, the leading man, and his party. “Safe oot!  Safe in!”   That’s quite a sight!  Well, there’s always next year.

However, on the Friday night when I returned home after saying “Not goodbye, just So long!” to my Kiwi friends, I joined with some of the staff of the British Heart Foundation shop to take part in the fancy dress parade.  We were, individually… warm hearted, faint hearted, broken hearted, half hearted, cold hearted, heavy hearted and chicken hearted, with a couple of Queens of Hearts thrown in!  The manageress and her assistant couldn’t decide which was to be the Queen so both were!   Somehow we didn’t manage to be in the competition, but we did get to parade along the High Street and round some of the back streets to return once more to the High Street and back to the Green where we’d started from.  It was actually a lot of fun, waving to friends, and anyone else really, with the traditional Hur-ray”shouted between!

These are the doggy walkers.  Can you spot the real dog?

Then the dig at the English world cup football team.  They said they were coming home , and they did,  in fact the very next day, a lot sooner than they thought.

These oversized leprechauns were in honour of Ryan, – could he be an Irishman perhaps -  the guy who got his 4x4 stuck under the Cuddy footbridge earlier this year – see Talk of the town!  

They called themselves Ryan’s Riverdance!   Don’t forget you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

Saturday morning saw the children parading to the church steps, the arrival of the Beltane Queen to sit on her throne and be crowned by a worthy lady townswoman -  Catherine, this year, one of my former work colleagues from a few years ago.  After all the pomp and circumstance, the kids in their traditional fancy costumes head off to join their float – I should think that all the lorries/trucks in the town are inveigled into service – for the Grand Parade. 

The streets are lined with townspeople and visitors -  many of them ex-pats from overseas who have returned especially for the festival  – and led by the Cornet on horseback and his party,

 

followed by the Beltane Queen and her courtiers in their horse-drawn landaus and carriages, the parade begins. 

 

 

Pipe bands from Peebles, Innerleithen, Galashiels, Coldstream and Penicuik also took part this year, as did the Peebles Silver Band, 

and  various of the fancy dress competitors,

 

 

 

and the floats carrying the children –

 

“wee mice peeping out”, soldiers and sailors, penguins,

 

toys, children from other lands, archers….. I can’t think of them all.  All were cheering  - “Hur-ray!  Hur-ray!” You have to have that break in the word indicated by the hyphen or it doesn’t sound right, Beltane style! -  and sweets/candies were being thrown from the crowd to the children in the floats.  The floats tour around the streets of the town for folk who can’t come down to the town centre, and another “fording” takes place across the little Cuddy Burn to the north side of Peebles.  People still gather by the edge of the route to wave and cheer and throw sweeties, and finally the cavalcade meets up again with the bands for a final march along the High Street.  The children are usually a bit overwhelmed by all the excitement by this time and have given up cheering, though there are still a few tentative waves to the  remaining crowds!  

But hey!  How could I forget the Rugby Club boys who get dressed up to entertain the folk waiting in the High Street  for the parade’s return!  It is always a laugh to see the wigs, balloon boobs, tights and high heeled shoes, etc. as they perform their dance routine to loud music carried with them as they move along the High Street.

And then it is all over!  In the afternoon, the kids can go to the fairground  – the Shows – in Victoria Park and later, in the evening, the pipe bands assemble once more to “beat the retreat” that indicates the end of the week’s festivities!  (I missed that, as I was up in Edinburgh by then.)  By early Sunday morning the bunting, flags and banners have disappeared, and the High Street looks as it usually does once more.  How the bunting hanging across the street brightened the place up.  Well, it’s gone now…  until next year!  “Ah well, then,” as one Peeblean puts it, “Soon be Christmas!

Oh, not too soon!  Pleeeeeease!

Talk again soon!

Around Moffat, and a surprise

Eunice and I met through the internet, researching our families with the same surname in the same town.  We thought for a while we were searching for the same family, until I found a death certificate that explained why names and some dates didn’t tie in!  I had had to make an educated guess at one point but settled on the wrong parents for one of my Johns!  Anyway we had become friends by that time so were always interested in how the other was getting on, helping each other along the way too.

We first met – in the flesh - two years ago when I visited them in NZ and they introduced me to their family, took me out and about and generally treated me like one of the family.  I love them all to bits!

Anyway, after their few days in Edinburgh, we all came down to Moffat for a few days, this being the place where we each had had ancestors.   We stayed in a lovely flat right on the High Street, the main street, just up the road from the old cemetery and across the street and round the corner from “ancestral homes”.

The old cemetery had revealed gravestones of each of our sets of ancestors, my James and Christina, and their John and Jean!  Ken also found my James and Christina’s daughter’s and her husband’s  grave.   Rosemary, Eunice’s daughter, back home in NZ had suggested they put flowers on the grave, and at my suggestion we picked posies of wild flowers growing in the church yard and placed them on top of our respective ancestors’ headstones.  After all, it was most likely those kinds of flowers that would have decorated their modest homes way back in the 19th century.

We walked round the various streets we knew were where our families lived and I am pretty sure each family would have known the other, as the town can’t have been very large 180 years ago.    I am fairly certain some of my ancestors lived in one of the cottages in this photo the ones almost hidden by the hedge and tree, and that the nearest one was also single-storeyed, originally.

Talking of ancestral homes, next day we drove up to Peebles, via the Devil’s Beeftubs road and eventually reached  Dawyck, and Stobo where some more of Eunice’s forebears had lived  - in a shepherd’s cottage high up on a steep hill.  I stopped to point it out, a distant speck on the hillside!   Photos were taken and on we drove,  past the road to the farm and the cottage itself - which I of course pointed out - to pull into the lay-by on the side of the road, where I announced that their transport to the cottage was waiting.  Linda was there in her 4x4 to take us all up the steep rough track!   She took Eunice and me first then came back down for Keith and Ken.  

Well, the looks on all their faces was enough to tell me it had been right to bring them here!  They were super-delighted.  It had been beyond their wildest dreams! We spent quite a

while up there admiring the view and speculating on the kind of life the ancestors must have had up there in the 18th and early 19th centuries.  No 4x4s then, no electricity, no shops nearby……… a lonely hard life, looking after the laird’s sheep.

  We came back down again in two journeys and after lunch at Dawyck, and a quick look at Stobo Castle Health Spa,  - there is a legend in Eunice’s family that a baby long ago was left on the steps of the castle before the parents emigrated, but the castle is too late in date, and nothing has ever been found out about  who the baby or its parents might have been, so nothing can be substantiated - came into Peebles where the red and white Beltane bunting was flying.

Eunice has been looking forward for ages to seeing the new french doors onto my balcony, and enjoyed standing there leaning on the rail ,,,,,,, just looking!.  They loved my view of the river!

 

Ken even ran down to the Green and took this next picture of us giving a regal wave from our exalted position!!

 

We were meeting Morag and Mike later for a meal in a local restaurant but in the meantime had a cup of tea,and Eunice wrote an email to Rosemary to tell them where they’d just been!   Eunice is still smiling!  She said it felt like a dream!

We had a lovely meal at Osso, and then took a walk along the Green to where I had parked my car.   One last photo was taken by Ken, of us with Morag and Mike, before we said our goodbyes, and set off down the road again back to Moffat.

I wish they could have stayed longer for a better look around the town, but at least they have been here, and hopefully will have plenty of memories to take home with them.

Talk again soon.

Playing Catch-up

Well, it has been an action packed few days since Eunice and Keith arrived, and we have had a wonderful time together.   Their son Ken arrived to join them last Sunday too.   We’ve been to

 

 

 

 

Queensferry, over the Forth to North Queensferry (left) and

 

Culross, the 15/16th century village once a thriving coal mining village, and now restored as a visitor attraction as well as living village,

 

 

 

 

and when Ken arrived we drove down to North Berwick one day, via the picturesque villages of Drem and Dirleton

 

 

 

 

to visit the seabird centre where we could see on CCTV the gannet colony out on the Bass Rock – the largest gannet colony in the world  - 

 

 

 

 

and watch video footage of the various  other seabirds to be found around the rock, like this puffin.

 

 

Coming from winter in New Zealand Eunice, Keith and Ken were enjoying the summer weather here, and so was I!   We don’t get enough of it normally, these days!

 

Talk again soon.