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2001-11-26 - 11:38 a.m. U.K. Day 13: Holyroodhouse and Haggis This morning we went to Loch Levin - the castle stands on a small island out in the Loch. However, you have to read the tiny print in the guidebook to notice that the regular ferry service isn't available in November. We walked along the shoreline and took a few pictures, but access was (pout) denied. We drove on into Edinburgh for a tour of Holyroodhouse Palace. We didn't go on our previous Sunday in Edinburgh because Theo's enough button had been pushed, so we went back today. Holyroodhouse started with an Abbey dating back to King David I of Scotland in the 11th century. Seems David was attacked by an outraged stag one day while out hunting, so he dropped to his knees and prayed. When he put his hands up to fend off the attack, he was grasping a cross. The stag had a cross between his antlers. The stag vanished and the King was saved, left kneeling, holding the cross. As thanks, he founded an Abbey on that very spot. The cross ('rood' is an early Scottish word for Cross) from the stag's antlers was kept as the Abbey's holy relic. When this was functioning as the capitol city, the nearby Abbey was much more comfortable than the drafty castle on it's exposed mountaintop, so a royal residence was built near the abbey, and things evolved from there. Now, the ruins of the Abbey partially remain on the side of the palace. Nothing but the nave left of the abbey church, and it's in fairly poor shape. Someone got the idea in the Victorian era to put a stone vault on the roof and collapsed a lot of the remaining walls. They've bricked up the second story arcade windows and built a closing wall at the top of the remaining nave, looks quite odd. The palace proper was built in the 15th century -fire destroyed it, so most of the palace was rebuilt in the 16th and 17th centuries. It's a lovely place, but much too ritzy for my taste. You know me, so not a garish girl. You can still the blood stains where they threw the body of Mary, Queen of Scots supposed lover after he was murdered be her husband and the noblemen - yes the stains remain evil though (ominous music) they've changed the floorboards several times since that day. We saw the room where Sean Connery was knighted - I must've missed that bit of world news. My favorite thing was the embroidery of a ginger cat with a mouse under it's paw - made by Mary, Queen of Scots during her imprisonment by Elizabeth I. She saw her cousin as the cat and herself as the mouse. Just as we finish the tour, I hear Wait, that looks like Rob and Wendy! We turn, and it's Tamma, Tara, Brian and Nancy-Ellen. And says Nancy-Ellen She has good hair. (I swear, one truly unfortunate incident with pigtails...) They were heading into the palace just as we were leaving. We left them to their tour and walked down Princes Street, doing a bit of window shopping. I stopped in Virgin Megastore where I picked up two Steve McDonald CDs - Scottish folksinger - we heard his music during dinner the other night. Then we did a quick tour through the National Gallery of Edinburgh. A few nice things, but mostly 18th and 19th century stuff. It was freezing cold, so we headed over to the Lochmeri's hotel early. After accidentally waking Meng from her nap (sorry! Yours was the first room number in the sequence), we found Tamma and Tara hanging out in the hotel and went up to meet them. Courtney wandered in and we left her napping while we hung out in the bar with the twin and Susan. Ah, but Susan gets a call from Beth - she and Matt have found a pub round the corner with live fiddle music - so we toddled down to join them. After the crew reassembled at 6:30, a brief area survey led us back to the same pub (Tass) for dinner and drinks. I had (thanks to Q sharing) my first taste of haggis. Quite good, actually, like a spicy sausage. Fish and chips, yum, yum. We swapped tourism stories and shopping finds (I shouldn't have told Meng about the Tower of London jewelry display. There's one case with the setting/shell of a crown, but the royal family doesn't own enough jewels to leave it set. So DeBeers has lent enough raw diamonds to set the thing, just for sake of display, and they're a huge pile of thousands of unset diamonds next to the crown setting. Stop drooling Meng.) After dinner, we left them to late shopping (Thursday evening the stores are open quite late) while we drove the hour plus back to our cottage in Kenmore. I was more tired than I thought - why does cold weather make you so weary - and feel asleep in the midst of Bridget Jones's Diary. But the wonderful Rob took away my book and (yawn) tucked me in. � � � 
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