Day trips

Now that the weather has improved and I'm also allowed to drive again, we've been on a couple of local trips.  Last Sunday, we crossed the Forth to visit Aberdour castle.  Like many local castles, this is fairly small and now ruined, with enough remaining to explore for half an hour or so.  By sheer chance, we turned up on a day when the local re-enactment society were putting on a show, so we admired the weapons and the braid weaving, then watched a mini-tournament.   Much fun was had.  I particularly liked the moment when "King Robert the Bruce" told a nine-year old in the audience that he was old enough to be working in the fields.  None of this namby-pamby primary school nonsense...

Today we took a boat trip to Inchholm from South Queensferry.  We arrived with plenty of time before the sailing so we took a walk along the shore into the Dalmeny estate, which was pleasant.  This turned into a miniature beach expedition, complete with shell collecting and sandcastle building, which in turn meant we had to hurry back in order to catch the boat!  The beach is rather pleasant.  The views are rather industrial, being dominated by the Forth bridges and the Hounds Point oil terminal, but they are actually quite interesting, even though they aren't the typical pastoral seasides of the tourist brochures.

Inchholm has a ruined abbey which again provides a good amount of exploration.  When it was first built, it only had a single fireplace, so the monks must have been very hardy people.  The island itself is very pretty.  It is covered with sea birds, which are very noisy and seem to enjoy dive-bombing unwary tourists.  Ifyoiu were here for a full day, you might run out of things to do, but there is plenty to fill the 90 minutes shore time granted by the boat trip.  On the way back we saw a couple of seals basking on a buoy.

The commentary on the boat pointed out some things to see and explained some of their history.  We were quite surprised to learn that some liners (such as the QE2) are too large to sail under the Forth Bridge.  That is not a small bridge!