For our first anniversary, my husband and I took a trip to Scotland and Ireland. We made it to Edinburgh in time for the Festival.

	From our hotel room on Grassmarket we could see Edinburgh Castle.
	This is Greyfriar's Abbey. There's a pub called Grayfriar's Bobby right in front. The story is that back in the late 1800's, a Skye Terrier (Bobby) mourned on top of his master's grave for 14 years. I was struck by the fact that there was a pub so close to a church--but after several more examples I got used to it. Perhaps more amazing to me, since I'm used to U.S. zoning restrictions, is that there is a group that sells midnight ghost tours in the church's cemetery. The office is down the alley.
	This is the statue of Greyfriar Bobby.
	This is Victoria Street. There are streets on either side of this street that are higher, so the gray tops of these buildings have the front doors to shops on the other side.
	This is Scott on Victoria. I was looking back towards Grassmarket, which is where we stayed.
	This is on the Royal Mile. Double decker busses were everywhere.
	This is a picture looking back down the Royal Mile towards the Palace.
	This is Edinburgh Castle, just inside the first set of gates. I didn't take pictures of the Royal Apartments at the top because there were way too many people there. I also didn't take pictures of the Crown Jewels because they don't let you--security you know.
	Still Edinburgh Castle, just before the Portcullis Gate. I got a good picture of the plaque on the left . . .
	. . . . and this is it. You can email me if you want a higher resolution picture. It says: In Memory of Sir William Kirkcardy of Grange, justly reputed to be one of the best soldiers and most accomplished cavaliers of his time. He held this castle for Queen Mary from May 1568 to May 1573 and after its honorable surrender suffered death for devotion to her cause on 3 August 1573.
	This is the War Memorial at the top of Edinburgh Castle. No pictures are taken inside out of respect for the visiting families. There are books inside with the names of all soldiers known to have died serving Scotland. There is also a beautiful room commemorating the soldier's with names that are unknown.
	This is the other side of the War Memorial.
	This is St. Margaret's Chapel. It is the oldest building at Edinburgh Castle--likely built by her son to commemorate her. It was built in the 1100's, and is the only building that Robert the Bruce didn't have torn down when they took the Castle.
	This is one of the side seating areas in the Great Hall at Edinburgh Castle.
	In between the seating areas are decorative sword, spears, pikes . . .
	There are no nails in the roof of the Great Hall, and this is the only thing in here of Medieval instead of Victorian construction. If it looks a lot like the hull of a ship, that's because it is built exactly like one.
	This is Scott in the Great Hall. Great Scott!
	This is New Town from Edinburgh Castle. The green land you see below used to be the lake that they threw hundreds of women in to test if they were witches. They tied their thumbs and toes together. If they sank, they were innocent. If they floated, they were dragged up to the Castle and burned as witches. But hey, if you drowned you were cleared of all charges and your family got a letter of apology. Did I mention they found hundred of corpses here when they drained the lake?
	Another picture of New Town--this one from the roof of the Camera Obscura. In between Edinburgh Castle and the Camera Obscura we visited the Scottish Whisky Heritage Center--but I was having way too much fun to take any pictures.
	This is a picture of the hub from the roof of the Camera Obscura.
	This is Scott in the Camera Obscura--he's lighting a fluorescent bulb by carrying the current from a big plasma ball.
	Next we went down into New Town to see a play and to visit the International Book Festival. On the way, we saw the Livingstone Statue with . . .
	the rather spiky Scott Monument right next it. Some rather large proportion of Scottish monuments are all spiky like this.
	This is the statue of Sir Walter Scott in his monument . . .
	. . . . and this is the plaque explaining his significance.
	This really made me laugh. This is the Church of Scotland. It was one of the venues for the Fringe Festival. The sign over its door lets you know that this is a Fringe Venue--there is a large advertisement for Beck's beer on the sign. This would never happen in the States--we are so prudish about alcohol.
	After the show and the book festival, we stopped into an Italian restaurant downtown. The prices everywhere were about twice what we'd usually pay, so we tried to imagine that pounds were dollars to reduce the sticker shock.
	We then spent several hours in the National Gallery, which is the most amazing art museum I've ever been in. Some of the paintings they had there were just incredible.
	This is Canongate, on the Royal Mile. Adam Smith, the writer of The Wealth of Nations, is buried somewhere in this church's cemetery. We went looking, but didn't find the gravestone. Gravestones don't last as long as we thought they did. Most of the stones were too weathered to read. Many of the stones were toppled.
	The goofiest building I've ever seen is Parliament, at the end of the Royal Mile. In the midst of all these old historic buildings there is this modern creature with what looks like bamboo over windows and doors, and funny stones in front that look like teeth.
	Parliament is directly across from the Queen's Gallery and the Palace of Holyrood.
	To get a better view of Edinburgh, Scott and I climbed Arthur's Seat, at the end of the Royal Mile.
	The slope of this thing was ridiculously steep--30 degrees for most of it, and even steeper on this bit here.
	The view from the top is incredible, though! Scott got better pictures than I did. In this picture, you can barely make out Edinburgh Castle to my left.
	We celebrated our victory with a glass of cold chocolate (53 percent cocoa!) and a couple of orange truffles here at the Plaisir du Chocolat.--"Chocolate Heaven bar none". I'm still going to pretend that our walk deserved this decadence. Yummy!
	During the Fringe Festival, a huge chunk of the Royal Mile is barred from traffic, and street performers are everywhere. In addition to acrobats, musicians, and actors, there were performance artists everywhere.
	This man was a wind blown statue (it wasn't this windy, honest!) . . .
	. . . . and this man was a living bronze statue . . .
	. . . . while this woman was a living statue of a Lady in White.
	There were also artisans selling wares everywhere. These are the most amazing "balloon animals" I've ever seen--a whole bouquet of flowers, Elmo, and Homer Simpson.
	At night, the Tattoo would happen up at Edinburgh Castle. We were close enough to hear all of it, and went to bed after the last emotional bagpipe melody. The castle was bathed in colored lights and there were fireworks every night.
	The part of town we stayed in, the Grassmarket, used to be where the town gallows were located. This pub is doing an excellent job of exploiting this reputation . . .
	. . . . while this pub seems to be exploiting Edinburgh's wealth of philosophers.
	In Edinburgh, it's pretty easy to find some philosophy.
	It turns out that the Exchange building is built on top of a part of old Edinburgh, so that all of these old buildings are preserved underneath. We took a tour of those closes.
	There were, of course, a couple of ghost stories. These are toys that are left by visitors for one of the little girl ghosts (Annie).
	Next we visited the Museum of Scotland. We toured 2 out of 7 floors and I can't even begin to tell you the cool stuff we saw while we were there. I can't decide which of the following pictures I like better, so you just will have to look at lots of them.

We also took a morning to go visit Stirling.

	I'm not sure yet whether roundabouts are ridiculous or the most brilliant traffic inventions ever. To be perfectly honest my teeth were usually grinding from driving on the left, shifting with my left hand, trying to decipher the road signs, dealing with lanes that felt way too narrow, and dealing with constant honking because I was driving too slow . . .
	This is the town of Stirling.
	The cemetery below Stirling Castle is full of Mackie's and MacKay's. There were so many that I grabbed pictures of the gravestones for aid in the genealogy research I'm doing for my husband's family.
	Stirling Castle is in the middle of being restored. This is its Great Hall. Notice the unicorn statues on the roof. The whole castle was covered in unicorns.
	This is a unicorn tapestry currently hanging in the chapel. There will eventually be 6 and they will hang in the palace at Stirling Castle.
	This is one of the tapestries currently being woven at Stirling Castle. It will take 4 years to complete.
	The site of Stirling Castle, and the castle itself, is ancient. But none of the buildings are as old as you might expect. Robert the Bruce (shown here) ordered both Stirling and Edinburgh Castles razed to the ground when he captured them.
	This is the spiky tribute to William Wallace, seen here from Stirling Castle.

We arrived in Ireland on the Friday of a bank holiday for the North, so it took us a whole evening to drive to Ballyliffin. Our drive was complicated by the fact that the roads around the Inishowen Peninsula are narrow country roads, and it was raining. We got into Ballyliffin late to discover that the bed & breakfast we'd been booked into no longer existed--in fact, it hadn't existed at the time we made the booking. The proprietor of the old bed & breakfast called around for us (there were something like 4 weddings in Ballyliffin that weekend) and found us a room at the Carrickabraghe house. We spent the next several days exploring Northern Ireland, including both the U. K. part of Ireland and Donegal.

 

	This was taken on the drive to Malin Head. You can see the beginning of the sea inlet and you can see more of Donegal on the other side. This peninsula is called Inishowen. The gaelic is 'Inis Eoghain', or 'Owen's Island'.
	A German woman was kind enough to take this picture, even though Scott broke into her car.
	If Scott ever has some ridiculous accident, it will be because he wandered out on some precipice to get a really good picture. Actually, other than the fact that it was windy enough to blow us both over, I'd probably have gone out with him. This was on the northernmost point in Ireland. We walked along a rocky coastline for a ways and grabbed all sorts of great pictures.
	The roads here are often one lane, and the speed limits are higher than they would be in the states. To top it off, the signs are often only in Gaelic or completely nonexistent, so I often found myself in places I hadn't intended to be. This castle was along one of those roads.
	The ruins are situated between two developments, and you can wander all over them. I had to convince Scott not to climb the tower--there were places where the steps had fallen away. The ruins are pretty heavily littered and graffittied. There was a sign out front that started with "Fojra", and I remembered that word for days, hoping that it was the name of the castle, but "fojra" is just the gaelic word for "notice".
	On our way to the Giant's Causeway I got lost again, and we ended up at the Mussendin temple. This is a picture taken inside the manor house.
	I loved this high round window in the main hall through the manor.
	The temple itself is behind the manor on the coastline. The bishop built it to house his library.
	The Giant's Causeway is this strange volcanic formation with hundreds of roughly hexagonal pillars extending out into the sea.
	The myths are that it was a bridge built by giants or that Fionn McCool used it as a bridge to some island off the coast. Scott and I climbed out on them for quite a while.
	We next drove around to Carrick-a-Rede, where there is a rope bridge strung across every year to an island with a fishing rig. The sign outside said that 130,000 people had crossed the bridge this year. This picture was taken on the little over a kilometer hike to the bridge--which doesn't sound bad until you see all of the steps.
	This is Scott on the rope bridge. The island was pretty cool in and of itself. We got lucky and there was quarter rainbow in the distance. You could also see the mouths of three sea caves, some other volcanic islands, and some tall white cliffs. Scott has what is probably the best picture of us for the trip, taken by climbing down to promontory jutting out of the little island.
	As mentioned previously, the bed and breakfast we were booked into no longer existed, but the family who used to own that B&B called around for us and found us another place to stay. Hannah, who owned the B&B we actually stayed in, recommended a trip to see some waterfalls. I can't decide which picture I like best from that hike, so I've included many.
	She also recommended that we drive up to Mamore Gap, which is a mountain pass covered in heather.
	I was quite determined to see Grianan Ailligh--a ring fort that the Ui Niells ruled from between the 5th and 12th centuries. The fort itself was built about 2000 years ago, and there is a 5000 year old burial mound around it somewhere--we couldn't find it.
	The inside of the fort rises to about 5 meters and the walls are 4.5 meters thick.
	This is a picture of Scott on top of great-grandpa's ring fort.
	Our new bed and breakfast, the Carrickabraghe house, had a lovely view of Pollan Beach and Malin Head. We found out about 5 minutes before we left that it had been named after another ruined castle that was very close--but as Hannah said, there is a ruined castle on top of every hill in those parts.
	This is sunset on Pollan Beach.
	We drove into the heart of Donegal to visit Glenveagh national park--which was part rocky heather-covered mountain, part bog, part red deer sanctuary, part charming lakeside. We walked the 4 km along a lake to Glenveagh Castle and the gardens.
	Then we drove out to the Rosses and along the Bloody Forelands (Scott has pictures, I never found a place to pull over.) and stopped to take a short hike in the Forest of Ard.
	We then drove just a little ways to Doe Castle, built in the early 16th century. We had the castle all to ourselves to explore. Just outside the castle is a graveyard that has a tomb dated 1544. The gravestone has a beautiful Celtic Cross engraved on it, but it is hard to see under the protective covering they put on it.
	On our way to Castledermot from Ballyliffin, we stopped at Carrowmore outside Sligo. The tombs here are as old as 6000 years. The large stone mound here is roughly in the center of 100-200 grave sites. Some of the grave sites have been lost due to stone robbery. In the center of the mound is a cairn that looks like a huge stone table. The grave sites around the mound are marked with dolmens--which look like stone houses with the passageways facing the mound--and stone circles.
	We stayed our last few days in Kilkea Castle just outside Castledermot. The castle was beautiful, and the food was yummy.
	We got lost on the way to the Moone High Cross (imagine that) but managed to see this beautiful ruined tower in a graveyard.
	We did find the Moone High Cross. This was found in three pieces but, other than that, remarkably whole.
	This section, from bottom to top, shows Daniel in the Lion's Den, Abraham & Isaac, and Adam & Eve.
	Another "Quick, pull over!" find, this 13th century building, St. Mary's Church . . .
	. . . . was full of amazing tombstones . . .
	and beautiful stained glass.
	Jerpoint Abbey was also beautiful, with a large courtyard surrounded by graceful arches, stone figures carved into the walls, and more tombstones.
	I'll admit that I have a weakness for Celtic Crosses.
	This picture was taken at the Waterford Crystal Factory. It is a replica of their Millenium Ball that is dropped in New York City every year. The real one has something like 24 miles of wiring. All the work is done by hand--we got to watch spouts being made in hot glass, the glass blowing, the glass engraving, and special inspired works done by the master artists.
	On our last day in Ireland, we visited Powerscourt Gardens. The following flower and sculpture pictures are all from our morning there.
	The Powerscourt Waterfall was some number of kilometers away and hard to find, but worth it.
	Our last visit was to Glendalough, a monastic village in a forested valley with two lakes.