Jim caught a bus back to Edinburgh after we had had the campers’ special (on price) breakfast at the Jedburgh Woolen Mill Cafe on the other side of the road from the camp site.
It was raining so we went to Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott’s house. This is a house down at heel and in trouble and Prince Charles has donated money towards its refurbishment. I wonder whether the amount he donated is equivalent to the £120 Queen Mary’s strange piece of china raised for Mary Stuart’s house? It will close in September for refurbishment of the main rooms, a new visitor centre and car park will be built and the rest of the house will become a hotel. I seem to have heard that one somewhere else.
The house is the epitome of bad taste, having most of the Scottish architecture’s knobs and whistles.
Scott became bankrupt at some stage and it was either his publisher running off with his money or the cost of the house. His granddaughter sold off most of her inheritance to extend the house and build a Catholic Chapel as she married a catholic and converted. Cardinal Newman was a great friend and visited them frequently.
Scott’s desk in his “secret” study where he wrote books “secretly” to raise money after he was bankrupt. He was a lawyer and continued working as a Sheriff (which was why he went to Jedburgh – and probably most of the other Border towns.) The room had housed 9,000 books but they had all “gone”, prior to the works.
The Library – all books gone
A comfortable chair
A ceiling boss of the death mask of Mary Stuart
Walter Scott by Raeburn and chinese wallpaper
Ceiling bosses in the lobby where guns and knives adorn the walls. Scott apparently gave up shooting birds when he acquired a pet raven. However the raven was short lived as it became an alcoholic.
Some of the bosses are facsimiles of those in the abbeys
Necklace of human bones
It had been/was raining hard. The brown line between the grass and the trees is not a road but the Tweed.
The dining room
The tiles are Chinese, not Delft
A life size statue of his favourite dog, under which said dog is buried
A cabbage on the ceiling in the dining room
Scott’s shoes, trousers and gloves.
After Abbotsford we went to Melrose and the sky started to clear. The abbey at Melrose is on the edge of the existing town, unlike Jedburgh which is right in the middle of it.
There is less of the abbey itself but more remains of the buildings which accompanied it. There are two things which Melrose is most famous for:
1 A heart was found during excavations and it is assumed that it is that of Robert the Bruce as he wanted his heart buried at Melrose so this particular heart was reburied with great ceremony.
2 One of the gargoyles is a bagpipe playing pig (so Prang has competition).
There is a museum in a rather fine building, which may be of similar vintage to that of Mary Stuart’s house in Jedburgh, of which I failed to take a photo. It boasted the largest collection of piss pots in the world (4). A piss pot is designed to be used in a standing position and carried under the monks’ robes.
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