I decided that I would like to have a walk around St Andrews, a well known golfing town, well even I’ve heard of it so it must be popular. We drove all around the streets looking for parking and it was full. I can’t imagine that there was a tournament on but every man and his dog seemed to be there, each in their own car. We drove on in disgust and headed for Crail.

This was much more to our liking a lovely, pretty village with a harbour and what I really liked was the lack of modern signs and road markings. It looked and felt calm and quiet and de-stressed us both after the St Andrews experience.

The older houses are those that have the staircase to the upper floor on the outside of the building. When these were first built the ground floor was used as storage, probably for nets and such like and the upper floor was the living quarters. Now many of the houses are painted in pretty pastel colours and the staircases are decorated with pot plants. It really is a pretty place.

Pittenweem was the next town and I navigated my driver right to the very end of the coast road. It ended in a car park thankfully so I wasn’t too unpopular. The sun was shining and the wind was blowing so we took the KAP (Kite Aerial Photography) equipment for a walk up the cliff path. The photographs of the kids playground were very disappointing.

The area we were in is known as East Neuk. In Gaelic this means corner and this is a very pretty corner of Scotland. We were fascinated with the harbours. Most of them had 2 or sometimes 3 different building stages. The earliest stages were built of natural stones, not laid on their sides but placed on end and it catches the eye and I keep wanting to sketch them. This seems to be the style of the Dutch dam builders who came over to help with the building of these harbours.

St Monans was the nearest parking to a castle on the cliff top and we set off with all the KAP kit and followed the Fife coastal path for about a mile. It’s lovely scenery and when we arrived at the Castle I found out that it has the same name as my childhood home town, Newark. So in my honour I was allowed to do a solo KAP flight with the camera at my chosen height and angle. I managed to get some nice pictures. A dovecot, that is still in remarkably good condition sat on the opposite side of the gash in the cliff and as I was born in a converted dovecot I just had to have some aerial pictures. Again I was lucky and the sun shone casting lovely shadows. Patrick sat and did a sketch of the castle.

We discussed our next move because Edinburgh loomed large on the horizon. After 30 seconds we decided to bypass Edinburgh and have a look at North Berwick, a town on the Southern shore on the Firth of Forth. The whole of North Berwick is overlooked by ‘The Law‘, a 613 ft high volcano plug. It’s been around for a few million years and during that time the surrounding softer sedimentary rocks have weathered away. There are several of these ’plugs’ in the area, the most famous being Bass rock. Thousands of seabirds camp on Bass rock and you can get some fine views from The Seabird Centre at North Berwick . The centre is ecologically friendly, all the materials were sourced locally, only natural materials have been used, wood for partitions and worktops, copper gutters, stone or ceramic pipes for example. Maximum use of daylight has been made and they have their own little wind generator. It really is earth friendly.

Wednesday we moved down to Dunbar with it’s 3 harbours, it’s castle, it’s gunnery emplacement and a tiny tin hut puthering smoke out from a tiny tin chimney. We just had to walk right round the harbour to check it out and yes it was a kipper smoking house.

The rocks around here are volcanic and when the molten rocks cool at the right rate they set into hexagonal columns like the Giants Causeway in Ireland. We found several areas where the hexagonal’s can be clearly seen. They are a bit weathered but still very visible. I thought about having a game of hopscotch on them but one slip and you were in the muck, quite literally, a 10 ft drop into the old harbour - yeuk.

The castle was amazing, well what was left of it’s crumbling red sandstone walls. The whole castle had been built on rock outcrops and ridges over the sea. Sadly it’s now fenced off and the small cove it surrounds is out of bounds and I agree it does not look stable at all and as each high tide undermines a little more it could come crashing down any day.

We had a relaxing half hour in the gunnery just looking out to sea. There were Herring gulls, Great Black Backed gulls, Cormorant, my favourite the Curlew, I love it’s burbling call, a couple of Redshank, Eider duck and oh one Heron. I found a Seal just off shore and he was pointing his nostrils straight up into the air resting I think, completely ignoring the ‘Maggie’ dropping lobster pots all around him.

The last morning dawned bright and beautiful again, we’ve had some lovely weather. Pat managed to fly all his kites at Scremerston Beach and I was allowed to choose 2 pebbles to bring home. I negotiated and Patrick agreed that as the water container was empty I could take the equivalent weight in pebbles to 2 gallons of water, after haggling we agreed on one of each colour plus one for the road.

The last stop was at Bamburgh Castle, we thought we would be able to fly the Kite, but as were turning into the castle car park there was such a loud noise and I thought a lorry was going to hit us! We looked up and saw a jet fighter fly from behind the castle. We decided to give flying the kite a miss, we could so easily have ended up at Leuchers airbase dangling on the end of the line. I’m still wondering if the pilot was bombing the castle?

We had an uneventful journey home where we are spending a few days taking on stores and planning the next leg of the expedition.