We slept in a bit (7 am!!) and then went down for the wee Scottish breakfast in the restaurant downstairs. It was raining so we got to sit in comfy chairs by the windows and relax a bit.
After breakfast we got packed up, checked-out, and headed to Blair Castle just a few miles from Pitlochry. It’s a beautiful estate that has been remarkably well preserved and has gorgeous gardens and grounds.
They had some trees that were more than 300 years old…
After walking through the Diana Woods we went to the Herculean Gardens which ended up being a massive fruit orchard and water landscape complete with all sorts of water fowl.
Next we headed inside the castle, which was remarkable well preserved and laid out.
The china room was amazing and it had some gorgeous embroidery examples I want to try and copy.
After the castle we went and saw the collection of red deer that the castle has in a small enclosure near the castle. Red deer are much bigger than the white tail deer in the US and the males are roughly twice the size (about 500 lbs) of a white tail buck.
We headed out of Blair Atholl around 11:30 and the next stop was Scone Palace, the home of the Mansfield family. The Stone of Scone is at Edinburgh Castle but I mostly wanted to see the portrait of Dido Belle and Elizabeth Murray that hangs at Scone. We weren’t able to take photos inside the palace, but the grounds were also AMAZING.
We had been hearing peacocks screeching since we parked the car and as soon as we left the castle there was a peahen plopped down right in front of the door. There were peacocks and peahens everywhere around the palace, even a completely white one.
I got some feed from the gift shop and got to see them up close for a bit.
We had just started on our tour of the grounds when we encountered a peacock that was pretty far away from all the rest of them. As we were on the path that he had decided to stake his claim to, he was showing all his feathers very prettily, but we were able to get around him.
Dad was taking pictures and saying hello. The peacock took a run at Dad and started hissing about 30 seconds after I took this picture. Turns out the reason he was off here by himself, is that he’s an arse.
Alas, no video of the standoff. But the peacock wised up as soon as it was clear Dad wasn’t going to put up with his nonsense…
The rest of the grounds had some very old trees and a star shaped labyrinth that we stepped into to get to the bridge viewpoint.
We looped around back to the car and headed on the last driving leg of the day to Stirling, where we‘re staying the last two nights of the trip.
We found the Golden Lion Hotel without much trouble, since it’s almost in the very center of town, however the hotel parking lot was somewhat more challenging to locate. After looping around the block and not finding anywhere to park, I found a short term parking lot nearby and we parked there until we could get checked in.
We hauled the bags the two blocks to the hotel and checked in, and got the directions to the hotel parking lot, which was significantly closer… We got the car and did another circuitous loop around Stirling’s maze of one way streets and finally located the parking lot.
Having finally got the car settled we walked around a bit until we located a nice pub and decided to have a couple of drinks and a bite to eat.
We were exhausted from walking around TWO large estates in one day so we decided to crash at the hotel and feast on the copious amount of snacks that I have accumulated as we’ve been driving around Scotland (Dad is already a big fan of McVittie’s digestives).
I plotted out our next driving adventure for the morning (Covid testing! Yay?) and we both headed to sleep.
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