A ruinous day!

Ruins, ruins everywhere! We spent the first part of the day, after breakfast, organizing, ordering tickets & mapping our route to to car parks for the shows we’ll see for the rest of our time. And, Dennis made sauce. That done, we dressed & headed out. 

We went first to the ruins of Jedburgh Abbey and spent hours. It is a wonderful place that took 120 years to build & was added onto several times over the next several hundred. 

Lunch at a nice pub across the road. Tried Haggis. It was very good. Of course, I ordered the starter which was battered, deep fried haggis balls. What isn’t improved by battering & deep frying! We met Bryan & Jim on our way out. We were no longer the only gays in the village! They’re a nice couple from Dallas who are here following Bryan’s genealogical quest looking for forebears in the Abbey yard. They’ll be at the Tattoo tomorrow so we might run into them & have a drink.

Then we went up the road to the castle/jail & toured that. Interesting but...

Then we went to Dryburgh Abbey a few miles away. This has much less standing but was bought by a Baron in the 19th century who began excavation & preservation as well as landscaping the surrounding property as a park. It was later a favorite of Sir Walter Scott who is buried there along with his wife, daughter & son-in-law.

After this, which didn’t have an audio guided tour so we spent less time, we tore off the couple of miles to Melrose Abbey. This has more of the building still intact that the other two and is spectacular. We had about an hour there before they closed. All three were started in the 11th century and took over 100 years to build, were added to & improved for the next 4 or 5 hundred years and then fell into disrepair and were all abandoned by the 16th century though Jedburgh & Melrose had congregations that used the ruins (they built walls of stone or wood to close off the parts that still had a roof and just set up there) until the late 19th century.

After all these ruins, we headed to Sainsbury’s for a few things & went home, fixed some small food & had drinks then a very lovely meal of pasta, sauce, salad & garlic bread. Now we’re watching a bit of Fringe on 3, then we’ll play a few hands of cards while we wait to have room for the Rhubarb/Raspberry Tart with the Claret. Then I think bed.

More in the AM.