Glamis Castle, St. Andrews (day 7)

This morning we took a tour of Aberdeen city center.  You almost need to spend a week in this city just to see everything.  The architecture on the buildings is amazing.  There are no pictures yet because we only did a drive through.  One of the other lady’s in our group got pictures and I will have to go and get some from her photo site to post.  There is still a portion of the original Aberdeen cathedral still standing.  Evidently General Cromwell stabled horses in part of the cathedral at one time.  Leave it to the English.

There are oil rigs off the coast and we learned that Aberdeen is the oil capital of Europe and they service the oil rigs off the coast.  All revenues from the oil go to Westminster and this is a bone of contention for the scots as 90% of all the oil is on the scots side of the border and none of the money stays in Scotland.

We pasted Donotar Castle were the Scottish crown jewels had been being stored.  Cromwell was on his way to the castle to try and get the jewels so he could melt them down, but the jewels were snuck out of the castle right past the soldiers and taken to Edinburgh castle where they were hidden in a false wall so no one could find them.  Needless to say Cromwell never did get to the jewels.  Charles II in 1650 was the last person to wear the Scottish Crown jewels.

This area was also the home base area for the Picts after the Scots had settled in the West and North of Scotland.  The only remains from the Picts are the standing stones that you find around the island.  Their language completely died out.  843 or so Scots finally beat the Picts and after that the Picts disappeared completely.

We toured Glamis Castle.  The childhood home of the Queen Mother.  The family still lives in this castle but has opened up most of it for viewing.  This castle was very cool because while most of it was paneled over, there is still a very large section in the middle that has not been and you can really see just how thick the walls were when they built these things.  It was very neat to see a castle with the stones still showing on the inside.  Unfortunately we were not allowed to take pictures inside but here is a picture of the outside.

After that we were off to St. Andrews.  This is the home of golf and yes, you guessed it where Prince William and Kate met at school.  And yes, they have a plaque at the pub where they met.  Talk about capitalizing on tourism.  =)  This was our lunch break and we only had 2 hours here so Dwayne and I passed on lunch and headed straight for the Cathedral and castle ruins at the other end of town.  The Cathedral has quite a large cemetery with it and was quite huge in it’s day.  You can see the foundation for most of it and can get a feel for the layout.

You can’t see it but behind us in the picture is the other end of the cathedral.  I’ll post more pictures of the cathedral later.

From there we moved on to the Castle ruins.  We were able to get most of our pictures from outside the fence but the tower you see in the background on the right of the above picture can be walked up and Dwayne wanted to go up so we bought a ticket which included admission to the castle.  I thought he had pictures already downloaded of the castle.  I’ll post some later so you can see it.

After that we headed in to Edinburgh and to our hotel for the night.