Scone, the Palace of Scottish Kings

We arrived in Aberdeen yesterday, and leave this morning for Perth, before moving on to Edinburgh tomorrow. Both Alison and I feel the same about Aberdeen – it left us unmoved. It’s funny, sometimes when you arrive at a new city it almost instantly resonates with you as a place you really feel at home in, and sometimes, well, let’s just say Aberdeen never felt like one of those places. To be honest, the city is quite cold and austere, which seems to match both the climate and the people themselves. Aberdeen is known in Scotland as the ‘grey city’, because it is constructed out of granite.

Alison at Branklyn Gardens, Perth

No, they are not everywhere (contrary to a popular misconception), but we were able to find this Scottish Highland with a few makes at Scone Palace.

I don’t think I could ever describe the Scots as warm, gentle people, which is not to say they are not nice, simply that, in our view, there is a real harshness to them. I can certainly see why the Scots, under the famed William Wallace and others, gave the English such a hard time. The ‘f’ word is ubiquitous, and people do not mind saying it in whatever forum they find themselves, from the streets to the buses. It seems to be used in much the same way as Australians might say ‘bloody’.

'You can never take away my freedom' - this is a statue of Mel Gibson in the centre of Aberdeen. What, it's William Wallace, never heard of him!

They might be feared, but that is not to say they look fearsome, to the contrary, many people here look decidedly unhealthy. Smoking is almost everywhere; we think that close to one in three adults smoke, unheard of in Australia these days. Another element of life in Aberdeen we have not seen to the same extent anywhere else is the number of street beggars. These people are usually wrapped in a blanket or something similar with a cup placed in front of them on the ground. They are always very polite, and never confront or hassle you for money, but their very existence in otherwise wealthy cities is somewhat concerning.

As a former owner of Scottish Highland cows, I can't resist taking their photo.

On a more personal note, yesterday was a bit of a difficult one for us. The daily grind of packing up and traveling in the car for four hours is really starting to take its toll. The roads here are like nothing we are familiar with back home. You Google the distance to your next location, it estimates the travel time of two hours, and it ends up taking in excess of four. Roads are almost exclusively single lane, over-taking lanes don’t exist, there are villages and towns every few kilometres and the main highways go right through them and, the worst one of all, there are roundabouts every few kilometres – they simply have not caught up with the concept of the crossroad. You no sooner find yourself getting up to highway speeds when you are forced to gear right down again for the next roundabout, only to repeat the whole process again a few kilometres later. Try to imagine driving from Wangaratta to Melbourne, on a single lane road, with no overtaking lanes and the highway going right through the middle of every town, add to that a roundabout every time another road intersects the Hume and, if that’s not enough, throw in any number of tractors, which over here are used in much the same way as we use trucks, and you might have some idea of what driving here is like. It makes for very tiring days.

Scone Palace - I put in an offer, and the agent said he'd get back to me.

The Abbey at Scone Palace, where all the Kings of Scotland have worshipped.

We arrived in the very pretty town of Perth, about 60 miles from Edinburgh. We had read about an estate called Scone Palace (pronounced Skoon) not far from the town, but didn’t know much about its history until we arrive. What a magnificent place. The grounds seem to go on forever, and extend to woodlands, farm land, etc. The house itself is grand in every sense of the word. 

Here is the exact spot on which Scottish kings were crowned. In the photo you can see one of the current kings re-enacting the ceremony.

But by far the greatest significance of Scone is that it has been the place where every Scottish King for the past 900 years has been crowned, including Robert the Bruce. In fact, we can say with complete certainty that we stood on the very same spot that all of these kings have stood; quite a humbling thing.