Castle & Not-Arthurs-Seat

Sarah's second day in Edinburgh dawned bright and sunny so we packed a picnic and headed out to Craigmillar Castle. 

Even the bus stop was lovely!

I've also realized that you can put posts under a cut link on blogger (lets pretend I have only just began blogging, instead of having this for absolutely ages without noticing). Since I tend to do photo heavy posts that make it very difficult to scroll back through my blog history, I will be implementing them starting immediately, either for the whole post, or only for a selection of bonus photos. In this case, for the whole post.




We went to the grocery store first to grab a couple of things that were missing from our picnic. We were picking through the Cokes and I was complaining that in their 'share a coke with _____" campaign I can never find my name (and they have some pretty weird ones) when I pulled out this one! So happy to finally find one with my name on it!

We got on the bus and ended up approaching the castle from the opposite direction that I did the last time I went up there, and ended up walking through quite a lovely field full of wildflowers. There were loads of people out walking their dogs, and I can certainly see why - if I lived closer, I would definitely go for walks in the park!

There was a school group at the castle (who we began to hear from quite a far ways away), but besides from all the children, there were only like, four other people there, and the children left for their lunch break shortly after we arrived anyways.

The great part of going places with people is that you can actually get pictures of yourself other than selfies. Which is nice.

I've already talked a fair bit about the history of Craigmillar on my previous post on the subject. However, since that post fell in the illustrious period of time known as "Kyra accidentally deleted all the photos of her blog and fixed most of them but not all" it doesn't actually have any photos, so I will reiterate certain things:

Craigmillar Castle is located 4.8 km south east of the city centre, and was begun in the 14th century by the Preston family, and was expanded and renovated throughout the 15th and 16th centuries.
It is one of the best preserved medieval castles in Scotland.

The castle grounds were gorgeous, and the castle itself was in way better shape than you'd think to look at it from the outside - you are able to go all the way up to the top of the main building, and into the cellars, prisons, and basements of the lower part of the castle. Pretty much all of the staircases were spiral, which was super cool, and I went everywhere in the castle, except down one spiral staircase that the steps were just too narrow (even with the rope they give you to hold on to). 

(that remained true for this trip - Sarah and I had a look at that staircase, and decided we didn't really feel like breaking out necks in a medieval castle that day).

On the grounds were a church and burial site, and inside was a large courtyard, a considerable number of kitchens with fireplaces so big I could stand in them, bedrooms (some with their own latrines - fancy!), chambers, basements, storage areas, and a prison!

The corner towers were equipped with slits for shooting from.

Like last time, it was very windy up at the top of the castle.

But the view was amazing.

Picnic! (well, more like grab anything in my fridge that doesn't need any sort of prep to eat, but same difference).

After we left Craigmillar we hopped on another bus towards Arthur's Seat.

I was under the impression that this craggy bit was Arthur's Seat - however, as Sarah and I realized after we had already walked up it, this was not the case...

However, it was still a gorgeous walk on a lovely day, and gave us some really impressive views of the city.

You can see Edinburgh Castle in the distance in the middle of this photograph (the black spire nearby is the Scott memorial).

And that bump up there is the actual Arthur's Seat. Ultimately, inhaler-less and needing to go home before heading up to school for a talk on ePub business models, we decided not to attempt the actual hike. The talk was very good, though I didn't understand much of the first part on business models (Sarah did though). We then headed to a Japanese restaurant for dinner with Harriet, Eve, and Lindsey, before grabbing bubble tea and calling it a successful day.

For some reason blogger isn't integrating my instagram photos chronologically the way it normally does, so bonus instagram pics from this day!