First things first, though, was Rosslyn Chapel. This was the church that was used as the setting near the end of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (in the book and movie). Before this book, it used to receive less than 8000 visitors a year (except one year in the ‘80s where they had just over 8000). Since then it’s been over 110,000! The poor chapel needed a lot of work because the stone’s been crumbling away for 800 years or so. I was very, very lucky because the horrible roof that used to cover the whole church was dismantled and taken away 10 days ago! Now I could walk all the way around it to take photos. No photos were allowed inside, but I photographed their posters of the inside :-) :
We drove up to Thirlestane Castle, but decided not to go in because of the high price, the rain, and the time constraints we were under. However, we stopped to photograph Leaderfoot – a viaduct near Melrose:
Next stop was Melrose itself. A really pretty little town which we didn’t have time to do justice:
We basically just grabbed something to eat and then went to the abbey. We didn’t go inside, but just walked around the abbey ruin to photograph it:
Next stop was Floors Castle at Kelso. This wasn’t actually on the itinerary for today, but I’m so glad we stopped. This place was just beautiful! The staff were very chatty too, which, while it was really nice, did slow us down a bit:
We stopped at Dhryburgh Abbey but from the picture it wasn’t that good, so we didn’t bother going in. We drove on to Jedhburgh Abbey. I was prepared to pay to go in that one, because it’s magnificent. But it was already after 5pm, so no luck. It was another case of walking around to photograph it:
Time to get on – there’s still a way to go to Durham. There’s a beautiful view at the Scotland/England border, so we stopped for more photos. I hadn’t taken any landscape shots for a while, so it was a nice change:
There was rain and sunshine mixed up all around, so there were beautiful double rainbows which we kept stopping for me to capture:
We finally made it to Durham and started looking for somewhere to stay. I’d seen a place called The Victoria House on Tripadvisor but rejected it because the price was supposed to be about 70 GBP or more. It was the only one we found though, and it was already after 8.30pm, so I went and asked how much it would be. The lady running it gave it to me for 60 GBP, so we took it. It’s a really nice room and the pub in the bottom was obviously quite popular. We stopped for a drink before heading up to the room for the second-last night on the road with our yippie-eye-oh (the car’s registration was YPIO AVG).
