There is nothing worse than realizing, at the beginning of your two-week vacation, immediately after you’ve walked into an extraordinarily picturesque castle in the Scottish countryside, that the large DSLR camera you have lugged with you is broken. The situation quickly devolved into a minor tantrum in which I wanted to bash my camera against a stone wall. Severin intervened, offered to let me use his camera, and I begrudgingly accepted after his third or fourth entreaty. Marriage! (Also, it is February 18, 2017; more than six months after this happened, and I just today took my camera in to get fixed for the win!)
Stirling was built between 1490 and 1600, and is where the kings and queens of Scotland were crowned, including Mary, Queen of Scots. It has this beautiful, moody dark stone (or maybe it’s normal colored stone; I’ve just grown accustomed to the yellowish-brown stone of the Eastern Mediterranean!) You really need a drone or distance view to appreciate how huge the castle and the rock it’s built on are, but you’ll have to make do with these shots (from Severin’s camera ;-)!)
After we finished touring the castle, we had some delicious cookies from the castle cafe. The Scottish cookie came is STRONG, friends. I daresay they do cookies better than just about anyone. Must be that Scottish butter.
Stirling was destroyed, so we had parked in the Scottish equivalent of a park-and-ride (actually, that’s exactly what it was). The buses had stopped running for a lunch break, so we stopped and had the worst cappuccino I’ve ever had (this trip proved that all of the cliches about British coffee are absolutely TRUE). We were sitting in the courtyard of this church and still had time to kill, so we figured we’d peak in and see what was up.
We visit churches because we kind of feel an obligation to, since they are usually the oldest and grandest buildings around. But after a while they all kind of bleed together and you stop appreciating them. This one was pretty special though, so I’m glad we stopped. It is the Church of the Holy Rood (Rood/Rude just means Cross), and it was built in the 15th century and has these incredible exposed wood beams, which I don’t think I have ever seen in a church:
Interestingly, there was some sort of dispute between two ministers and the Town Council actually partitioned the church into two separate churches in 1656. They couldn’t get it together to reunite the church and break down the partition until 1935!
It also had this incredible stained glass memorial; clearly it’s modern– I can’t remember what exactly the inscription was, but I am pretty sure it is for World War I.
