The Travel Group’s visit to Lowland Scotland was blessed with glorious weather and 34 members greatly enjoyed their tour.
Our outward journey was via the A1 and this allowed stops for an hour in Durham and three hours in Berwick-on-Tweed, where a walk around the city’s grass-topped ramparts was the main attraction. Soon afterwards we were in Edinburgh, where we stayed at the Ellersly House Hotel in Murrayfield, which is a quiet suburb to the west of the city centre. Clearly its staff complement has benefited from the migration of eastern Europeans to the UK, and they catered quite well for our needs.
Our first outing was to the new building housing the Scottish Parliament. This was way over budget and completed late, but it is not difficult to see why. It is a truly remarkable building, quite unlike the Palace of Westminster, but forward-looking in a way that should suit the aspirations of many Scots for devolution. The guided tour was excellent, but an opportunity to sit down occasionally would have been welcomed by some of us. After that we went next door to Holyrood House and to the Queen’s Gallery, where there was an exhibition of Canaletto paintings. A walk around the gardens, with the skyline dominated by Arthur’s Seat, allowed us to enjoy the delightful setting for this intriguing mixture of old and new buildings.
Day 3 began with a visit to the Royal Yacht ‘Britannia’, which is now on permanent display in West Leith dock. This was a cosy Royal floating home and we could understand why the Queen shed a tear when it was decommissioned, but it is now being looked after just as lovingly as it was in its heyday. In the afternoon we went to see the Falkirk wheel, a brilliant Millennium creation for shifting boats between the Union canal and the Forth & Clyde canal, which differ in height by 34 metres.
Our journey home was down through the Borders to Eskdalemuir, where we spent several hours at the Kagyu Samye Ling Buddhist Monastery. This provided many colourful feasts for the eyes and an opportunity to get a feel for what has made the peaceful Buddhist way of life so attractive to many people over the centuries.
The emerging theme of this tour seemed to be contrasts between the old and the new, each with its own charms, and Alan Kay is to be congratulated on the nicely varied programme he devised for us.
Benita Jewell