Last day in Scotland

The last day was again a beautiful, warm, sunny day.  I attended the morning talks, then decided to call it a conference and enjoy the last day.  In an earlier post I had mentioned Arthur's seat.  We decided we wanted to hike up it.  On the way to the site, Chris asked me what I knew about it.  I proceeded to tell him the father of geology story and talk about volcanoes and rock patterns and such.  With a decided scowl he said, "So that was the nerdy stuff, do you know the interesting part?"  Turns out it is the fabled location of Camelot. That sounds intriguing.  We had watched a number of people walking up this path when we were at the Dynamic Earth reception across the road from here.  So at least we had an idea about where to start.

We started down there by the cars.

Holyrood Park was a 650 acre private park walled off by King James V in the 16th century.  The name "rood" means cross.  King David had been hunting in the 12th century and was thrown from his horse when he saw a white stag appear with a glowing cross between his antlers.  Apparently this was where he saw the white stag.

Here's a tribute to the "nerdy" part.

Once we moved past Holyrood Park and Hutton's Section, we saw another summit that had people on top and decided to press on to higher grounds! The path looked really steep, but seemed to be easy enough to climb as there were lots of people going up and down.

As we got closer, we saw that steps of sorts had been laid into the hill.  That was a big relief.

In the middle of this picture, near the top where it curves out, that's the top of the rock sections where we took the previous pictures with the rock sections at our back.

For perspective, we are about a mile from the castle.  There it is in my hand.

Then we decided to climb the next big hill. There is a marker behind us saying this is the highest point in Edinburgh.

After we rested our legs a bit from the climbing, we headed back down.  Oh yeah, we also got to see smoke from the cannon and hear the blast.  At 1:00 everyday except Sunday, a cannon is fired from the castle.  It was the first day we heard it.

These are the steep steps we climbed.

It was a perfect last day in Scotland.  We rewarded ourselves with dinner and a ghost tour around town.  We ate here, just outside the castle.  The food was delish!

appetizer

Caesar salad with anchovies

lamb stovie

seafood stovie

 The ghost tour took us all around the city to underground vaults and cemeteries.  Our guide was really good and we enjoyed his story telling.

Here's the last bit of Harry Potter trivia.  The cafe we ate in earlier in the week was next to a cemetery.  The story goes that Rowlings would walk through the cemetery to get names for her characters.  She didn't always spell them the same and sometimes she would use the first name of one person and the last of another.  This tombstone was the big find.  For those of you who don't know, Tom Riddle was the main bad guy, and this was where she got his name.

The people in Scotland were so friendly and the country so beautiful.  I'm sure it also added to our experience that we could read and understand the language ;)