Excursio Caledoniensis

My god-daughter and her family moved a couple of years ago and this week has been the first chance I've had to go and see them in their new surroundings - admittedly not very far from the previous ones, just a bit along the coast westwards from their previous home in the East Lothian town of North Berwick. Their new residence is one of an estate of houses built in the former park of a big house. As a result they now have their very own folly just round the corner:

Deliriously, it even has a pineapple on the top, that most Rococo and follisome of fruits. 

I managed to encounter a couple of less private ruinous pleasures on the trip, such as Prestonpans Tower, which is nice:

A longish walk to Aberlady took me past what is allegedly a ruined chapel on the coast path. I strongly suspect it isn't a chapel at all, but a tiny one-room cottage or shed, optimistically identified as ecclesiastical when the Ordnance Survey was first compiled and remaining that way ever since. It's square, for a start, and built onto a wall. However the remains frame a nice view across the Firth.

Wartime defences form their own subcategory of ruinous places, and the walk revealed a lookout post and row upon row of anti-tank concrete cubes, though you can't really imagine the Nazis being foolhardy enough to try and bring tanks across the sands and marshes of Gullane Head. Like many WWII defences, they may well have been put there just to give people the sense of doing something worthwhile for the war effort:

Although Kilspindie Castle at Aberlady is decidedly underwhelming - I could see it wasn't worth crossing the field to inspect the bits of two-foot-high wall which constituted the remains - the village does boast the ruins of a medieval friary in the woods, minimal but spooky:

And finally, in the grounds of the old Glebe House at Aberlady, and visible over the churchyard wall, is a Gothick gazebo decorated with flints and seashells. There's a pile of tufa by the garden wall, and that didn't get there by accident either. Whoever is responsible for this deserves undying admiration. Although the mighty Headley & Meulenkamp note the follies of Gosford House a mile or so away, this structure has escaped their observation; and it justified my long walk that day, and almost my entire trip to Scotland ...