June is blossoming!

Hello!

The month of May has come and gone most of it on various trips away from home. My current writing is still very slowly progressing, but since two of my visits during May were to places of interest for my writing research,  I've - at least - been doing useful work.

En route to a wedding in the Borders town of Kelso, I stopped off at the museum in Kinross to do some sleuthing. The curator wasn't there on the Tuesday but an appointment was made for me to consult with him on the Thursday on my way home. I spent a marvellously useful 3 hours that Thursday gleaning a general feel of what the next-door town of Milnathort was like in the 1840s and 1850s. So all told, including the couple of hours spent on the Tuesday, I clocked up more than five research hours on the Kinross area. 

The ruin of the Muckle Kirk (Secessionist Free Church) below gives an impression of what it might have looked like when in use. It features as a newish building in my novel!

Muckle Kirk Milnathort

The wedding was wonderful at Kelso in between, a delight to see my author friend, Amelia, tie the knot with her equally lovely husband Richard. I would certainly like to visit Kelso again and do more pottering about around the Borders. 

Another jaunt away from home was to the New Lanark Mill Hotel, part of the New Lanark Preservation area. The New Lanark Mill project of the late 1700s and early 1800s was an incredibly innovative initiative and was so successful, the mill was still operating, in part, all the way towards the end of the 1900s. Though Robert Owen gets most of the recognition for the establishment of a mill village, where good housing and schooling were part of the whole concept, he was just one of the people involved in encouraging better working conditions in mills, which could be incredibly dangerous places to work for children and adults alike. 

Since the New Lanark Mill is about a 3 hour drive away for me, I decided to stop off on my home at yet another Roman Scotland site that I'd not yet visited. 

Strathclyde Park, near Hamilton in Central Scotland, is home to the ruins of a Roman Bathhouse, and a fort site (invisible today to the visitor). The Bothwellhaugh Roman Bath House (Clotagenium) has been known for a few centuries but since the ruins were in danger of becoming flooded the whole area was lifted and the stones se-sited, exactly as they were found, in a new location just out of the danger zone. This makes it an interesting, though not quite authentic, site to visit. 

This month of June is mainly devoted to garden maintenance and new planting work though my intention is also to add a good bit more to my ongoing writing set in Victorian Scotland. 

Till the next time....Happy Reading! 

Slàinte!