This is Caerlaverock Castle. It's pronounced, as near as I can make out, cuh-lav-er-ock, and it means lark's nest. It was home of the Maxwells, and was the sight of famous sieges in the wars against the English.
This is Caerlaverock Castle. It's pronounced, as near as I can make out, cuh-lav-er-ock, and it means lark's nest. It was home of the Maxwells, and was the sight of famous sieges in the wars against the English.
At Caerlaverock, they had a recently built siege engine. Nancy in the picture gives a good sense of scale and just how big it is.
This is Smailholm Tower. The sky was strikingly dynamic when we were there (and actually for the whole rest of the trip.)
This is me on top of Smailholm Tower.
Threave Castle was built for defense with no frills. It's on an island in a river.
Another view of Threave Castle, with Nancy in the shot to provide scale (it was big).
Jedburgh is the largest of the ruined abbeys.
This is a view down the inside of the Abbey, taken from a preserved staircase on the second story.
I liked this door at Jedburgh Abbey.
This is Melrose Abbey. It's in Melrose, which is a cute little town near where we stayed the first night after leaving Edinburgh.
This is Dryburgh Abbey, where Sir Walter Scott is buried.
This is Sweetheart Abbey, so called because it was donated by a rich woman whose husband had died young and she kept his embalmed heart with her in an urn, and then had it buried with her when she died. Quite apart from that rather greusome story, the evening light was just amazing when we were there, making the grass surreally green against the red sandstone arches.
In Grey Mare's Tail Preserve, we hiked up a next to this waterfall.
The water for the waterfall flowed out of Loch Skeen up above.
Our hike for climbing the Merrick started at Loch Trool. We went up a valley and climbed a shorter peak, and then crossed a saddle to climb the Merrick. Then, we went down the other side and looped down a ridge by some Lochs and back around to our starting place.
This is the Merrick, photographed on our way down.
This is a view from partway up the Merrick. The tall jagged peaks are on an island.
We had just ascended the peak to the right. We continued behind this shot to go across a saddle and up the Merrick. On the way back down, we followed the ridge you can see here between the tree-farm forest and the lochs.
Here's Nancy crossing the saddle, abount to make the final ascent up the Merrick.
The views from the top were really quite spectacular.
This is Nancy during the descent.
This is a highlands cow at a farm we had to walk through to get to Threave Castle.
This is taken from a place that Sir Walter Scott liked to go to to take in the view. The trees to the left and off the screen are some of the only old growth in Scotland--the area was too steep for logging.