Scotland

This week, I returned home from a two-week vacation with my parents to the United Kingdom. Several months ago, my dad announced they were looking at a tour of England, which is where he served his mission fifty years ago. And I didn't see any reason I couldn't go too, so I invited myself along.

This was organized by Webb Tours, which is based in Salt Lake City and does a lot of Latter-day Saint history tours. This was not an LDS tour, but our tour guide, Peter Fagg, does a lot of LDS tours, so he did include some LDS content (which made me feel a little uncomfortable for the non-LDS people). Besides the guide, there were thirty-three of us in the group—most of them were older couples, but there were some friends, some mothers and daughters, and one couple with two college-aged children.

This was actually themed around English literature, which doesn't interest me that much. (There's a reason my major was English language, not just English.) But my dad selected it because it visited some of the places he remembered from his mission. Though I wasn't super interested in the literature, it was still a fun visit of the UK. Since I spend most of my time in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, it was fun to see things older than that. Of course, in the US we have some Indigenous sites and buildings that are that old, but they have not been continuously occupied. (For those who don't work in history, here's a reminder that the number of the century does not match the year: the nineteenth century is the 1800s, the fifteenth is the 1400s, etc.)

Most of my ancestors are English, but my ancestor Alexander Melville, who moved to Utah in the 1850s, was from Scotland. As I understand it, our first Scottish ancestor was a Norman invader from France, "Melville" being a French term for "bad settlement"—hence the URL of my blog. (If I were creating the blog today, I would pick a different URL, but oh well.)

There's a lot, so I think I'm going to divide the travelogue into a few different posts—so it's more digestible for all of us. 

On Tuesday, July 29, we boarded a flight for our trip. (My niece, Allie, housesat for us so Reggie wouldn't be alone, but she only saw him once.) We had a layover in Chicago, and then we got on our eight-hour flight to Edinburgh, Scotland. Our itinerary encouraged us to sleep as much as possible on the plane, since we would have a full day in Edinburgh without sleep the next day. But I can't sleep on planes, especially when it's a time I'm not used to sleeping, so I didn't sleep a wink, even though I tried. We got into Edinburgh the morning of Wednesday, July 30. 

We met our English guide, Peter, and then we boarded an enormous tour bus, driven by an Englishman named Kevin. We drove into Edinburgh proper, and it was fun to see all the old buildings, with their old-fashioned chimneys, where people still live and work. We went up on a hill where we got a view of the city. 

Then we went to the High Street of Edinburgh. (High Street is the equivalent of Main Street in the UK.) We saw St. Giles Cathedral, an ornate church that dates back to the fourteenth century, though most of the stained glass inside was from the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. 

I thought High Street was chaotic and crowded.

We toured a museum devoted to Scottish poets. One of these is Robert Burns, and he is most famous to me for writing the words for "Auld Lang Syne." 

We checked in to our hotel, and since we were tired, we thought our key didn't work because we only tried pulling the door and not pushing it. This is the first time in my life I have had a hotel room with a view of a castle. Many (most?) of the castles we saw follow a common history: castles were originally built in the twelfth century after the Norman invasion, but only a few elements remain; most of the walls were built in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, and there have been various events in succeeding centuries.

We fell asleep early that night, but we didn't sleep all the way through the night. I actually was less tired our first day than I expected I would be.

On Thursday, July 31, we went to our hotel's breakfast, where I was able to try haggis. The flavor was fine (even better than the sausage they had), but the texture was a little weird, and I couldn't think too much about it.

Then we got on our tour bus and drove up to St. Andrews, where we were able to dip our feet into the North Sea. This was where they filmed the iconic scene from Chariots of Fire, even though it didn't take place there. 

There were these little wormy patterns in the sand

St. Andrews is a golfing mecca, but of course that doesn't interest me. 

We walked around St. Andrews, which is very much a seaside tourist town, and I was amused by seagulls aggressively trying to steal food from people's hands as they were walking around.

We stopped in a café for lunch, and I got a vegetarian full breakfast. That way I was able to try black pudding without eating something that was actually made of blood. But this "full breakfast," including vegetarian options, was offered at most of our hotels the rest of the trip, so it wasn't a very special meal. The full breakfast usually has some variation of beans, eggs, roasted tomatoes, sausage, hashbrowns, mushrooms, and black pudding. The vegetarian "sausages" are potatoes and other vegetables inside a breading.

Our waiter had a strong Scottish accent, and when my mom ordered a lemonade, he made sure we knew British lemonade is different than American lemonade. (She knew that and wanted to try their version.)

All the gift shops had stereotypical Scottish things for sale. We went in a gift shop where they had crests of Scottish clan names, and my dad was happy to buy a Melville one.

We continued to walk around the tourist town and see other sites. I was embarrassed that our tour group was so big and often got in the way.

I was really happy to see thistle growing wild in Scotland, since it is their national emblem. I was really hoping to find socks or a shirt with thistle on it, but I didn't. I had to settle for a Christmas ornament.

We toured the ruins of St. Andrew's Cathedral, which originally housed the relics of St. Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland. But later the cathedral was abandoned, and people in the town used its rocks to build other things.

I believe this tower is from the eleventh century!

I think this is a twelfth-century floor

As we got into the cathedral grounds, my mom tripped on the uneven ground and fell, knocking over an A-frame sign in the process.

There were lots of tombstones on the cathedral grounds, many of which were illegible. Most of the dates I could read were from the nineteenth century. There were even some twenty-first century markers for golf enthusiasts.

As we looked at the dates, we came across some with the Melville name.

And there was even an eighteenth-century tombstone that said, "Here lyes the corpse of Ann Melvill." It was funny to see that after my mom had taken her tumble.

As we walked back to the waiting area for the bus, I noticed a tourist interrupting one of the cathedral's tour guides because she had found something. While we were waiting for the bus, one of the workers came up to our group, and my dad noticed that he was carrying my mom's phone! And it wasn't just her phone; she keeps her wallet attached to it! She hadn't noticed she had dropped it (presumably during her fall). This was just a few minutes before the bus came to get us. The timing was extremely lucky!

We returned to Edinburgh.

That evening, we toured Mary King's Close, which is a living-history site with tour guides in period clothing. A close is like an alley in Edinburgh where people lived, so we toured the old structures. I think these dated to the seventeenth century, and parts of the close were used as a bomb shelter during WWII. They didn't allow pictures.

On Friday, August 1, we went to visit Stirling Castle, which is more of the same medieval and Renaissance history. Most of the buildings are from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

They had reproductions of these fifteenth-century tapestries portraying the Passion of Christ with a unicorn representing Christ

After we left Stirling, we saw these massive "Kelpie" structures, which are part of Celtic folklore. These were just giant horse structures, and I'm not sure why this stop was on our itinerary.

We visited Rosslyn Chapel, which was built in the fifteenth century, but it was mostly abandoned for many centuries. It has many ornate carvings inside, but we weren't allowed to take pictures. The site received a boon from tourism in recent decades because part of The Da Vinci Code (which I haven't seen or read) takes place there.

That evening, the whole tour group was having dinner together, and my mom wanted to get a head start, so I opted to walk with her, navigating via Google Maps, which was difficult because my data was spotty. I was completely baffled, because Google Maps showed that I kept passing the restaurant. Where is it?! But we figured out that the name of the restaurant was Vittoria on the Bridge. We were under the bridge. We had to ask for directions to get up on the bridge, and we found it eventually.

Meanwhile, my dad was supposed to walk up with the group and tell the guide that we had left early. He didn't see the group standing outside the hotel, so instead of checking in the lobby (where they were meeting), he assumed they had left already, so he went out on his own, even though he didn't know where to go. When my mom and I got to the restaurant and met the group, we were dismayed to find he wasn't there. We had to call him, and then the guide had to go find him.

That evening, our group had tickets to the military tattoo at Edinburgh Castle. Tattoo in this case refers to a performance by armed forces. Edinburgh's tattoo takes place every August, and our group was lucky enough to happen to be there at the right time for it, so the travel company got us tickets. They erect a special stadium in front of the castle just for the tattoo.

The performance featured military bands and performers from Scotland, of course, with their iconic bagpipes and kilts. But it also had military groups from other countries, including Ukraine, Switzerland, and the US. The US Air Force did a performance where they flipped their bayonets in the air while someone walked through them. The tattoo also featured local civilian heroes, with a choir of civilians spread throughout the aisles of the stadium. This really was an amazing cultural performance, the most Scottish thing we could have possibly done. I don't think my description can do it justice.

The Scottish band

This was the Edinburgh tattoo's seventy-fifth anniversary, and the performance ended with some fireworks and a drone show. I love drone shows, so here are the symbols they had (in reverse order). Many of them were yellow and blue for solidarity with Ukraine.

I deliberately positioned this this way. This man was part of our tour group.

Because of the tattoo, we went to bed late, and then we had to get up early the next morning as we left Edinburgh. We went to Dawyck Botanic Gardens, which featured plants from throughout the world. They were lovely gardens, but we didn't have a lot of time there, and I'm not so interested in cultivated plants as I am in native plants.

Then we stopped at Gretna Green, which is near the border between England and Scotland. Historically, Scotland had looser marriage laws than England, so people would cross the border and get married at the blacksmith shop in Gretna Green. So now Gretna Green has a reputation as a marriage spot—which, of course, doesn't interest me all that much. 

The various Scottish gift shops generally sold the same merchandise, which included little booklets about Scottish clan names. I was surprised when my dad found a booklet about Melville in Gretna Green, since it wasn't at any of the other gift shops. Sadly, this booklet is not academically rigorous, and it's not overly informative.

And then we left Scotland and into England. That will be where I pick up in my next post.