Monday 7 August 2017

Beautiful Britain - 3 Castles in One Day, Aberdeenshire (Part 1)

Hi there everyone

We are back in Scotland for this week's post, still catching up on telling you all about our holiday with mum and dad, back in June.

When we were last up this way back in 2015 it was May and we paid a visit to Crathes Castle. We really enjoyed our visit, but we were just a little too early to see the June border at its best, though it did look as though it would be pretty amazing a few weeks later on.

As we are all members of the National Trust, we had a day of castles on the cards, starting with a return visit for us to Crathes.

As we arrived we had a real treat as there had been some serious 'yarn bombing' occurring and we agreed that we would definitely be parking up on the way out to have a closer look.

We decided that, as the weather looked a bit iffy, we would head straight for the gardens whilst it was dry.

We started off in the walled garden and though it was a dull day we were not in any way disappointed by what we found. The garden was absolutely spectacular and I have to apologise now for what is going to be a serious photo overload. If you don't like plants and flowers you may want to look away, but if you love them as much as we do then grab a cuppa, put your feet up and enjoy ...

The June borders, in both directions were absolutely breathtaking, one of the gardeners confirmed that everything that should be in flower was, so we were seeing the borders at their very best, be it a dull day ...

 As a whole these borders jam packed full of absolutely beautiful and vibrantly coloured flowers ...
There was just so much to look at. We were particularly taken with the Irises and came away inspired to find some similar for our own garden back home ...
We also loved the white borders and we were all surprised to find so many plants that we'd never seen before, even mum, with her encyclopedic knowledge of plants didn't know what a fair few were ...
Whilst these borders were the highlight of the garden for me, there were still lots of really beautiful plants and flowers to be seen. We'd never seen blue poppies before and there were some gorgeous peonies and roses. There was inspiration everywhere ...
From the walled garden we made our way round the back of the castle and the croquet lawn to more gardens to the rear of the castle ... 
We then left mum and dad to have a quick wander around the castle, whilst we opted for a quick breather in the cafe, before we headed off for castle number two.

But we couldn't leave without a stop along the driveway to capture some shots of the yarn bombing which was pretty spectacular in itself ...

We are so glad that we made a return visit, it was totally worth it. I can't see it being our last visit either. I really want to see it at this time of year again, but with bright sunshine and blue skies.

I think I'll save the other two castles for my next post, you can only take so many photos of flowers 😊🌷🌸🌹🌺🌻🌼

1 comment:

Thanks for taking time to comment on my blog. I love to hear what people think about what Martin and I have been up to.