Sunday, May 27, 2007

Staying at St. Fillans

St Fillians and near by
1. Sunlit wood, (centre) 2. Welcome to St Fillans, 3. Twisted tree, (photo by Jim) 4. Wine, 5. Oil lamp with no oil, 6. Rhubarb patch, 7. Plum Tree Cottage, 8. Celtic Design, (photo by Jim)9. Water, 10. Tissue box, 11. Strange faces appear..., (photo by Jim)12. Coffee?, 13. Sheep ornament

Created with fd's Flickr Toys.

We were incredibly lucky with the holiday cottage that we stayed in for our week in Scotland. The main reason for choosing it was that it was near Jim's final munro and ran its weeks from Sunday - Sunday which meant that he could go up with all his friends on a Saturday. In fact it was such a good cottage that we might well return to it - not something we usually do. We booked this cottage via this website.

Here is an enlargement of the mosaic of the cottage that I embedded in the one above:

Plum Tree Cottage

The weather was very mixed but I was happy to be in the cottage when it rained!

I was constantly entertained by the birds that visited to feed.

Feeding the birds at Plum Tree Cottage

One day we visited a Glen nearby and played with pebbles.

Pebble StackJim's Pebbles Dry
I made the stack and Jim made the flower.

In Callender we saw Scottish Dancing and kilts for sale:

Scottish Country Dancing Suits you sir!

But the souvenir I bought was this - not very Scottish maybe but a crow with character!

Feed me!

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gorgeous cottage! I'd be happy to spend some time there! and I love that bird - what kind it is? Not the crow, but the one with the yellow belly - it looks like our chickadee but ours don't have yellow bellies.

Anonymous said...

The cottage looks so charming, I think I could stay there for much longer than a week.

I love the stone art you both made. Love all the photos - especially the birds. Glad you had such a nice week away!

Dave said...

Beatiful cottage. Scotland is such a fantastic place and I would love to go there more often. Its a great place to cycle as well as its not as hilly as people think. Its just such a long way to drive.

Caroline said...

Tammy - the birds in the mosaic are: great tit (big picture) and blue tit (middle on the right). There are several different tits in the UK but these are, I think, the only two tits with yellow bellies. I did a search on "chickadee" and they look just like what I'd call tits... I wonder if at some point the word "tit" was discarded because of other associations!

Tinker - it was wonderful - I'd love to have a studio based on a place like that - would be ideal!

DaveM - parts of it are less hilly but with Jim doing Munros we've tended to visit the mountainous parts. I think some of the cyclists I saw would have preferred less rain! (And less traffic too)

andrea said...

My son insists that crows are the most intelligent beings after humans. I wish i could get him a crow like that! He'd love it -- even if he is 12 and would have to secretly love it. :)

Your mosaics are like illustrations in a design magazine or blog (I'm sort of addicted to two design blogs now). And the floor of your Scottish cottage is fantastic. Ever thought of investigating tourism photography? You really have the knack.

Tony LaRocca said...

Pebble art! Very cool stuff- I envy you, I need a bit of a vacation. Glad to see you all are having fun.

Joanna said...

Gorgeous cottage, great to see some more photos of Scotland, but best of all I love the crow.

Caroline said...

Andrea - I love the idea of doing Tourism photography... I wonder if anyone would be interested. Jim had also wondered if there was a market for people to go and stay in new holiday cottages to give the owners honest feedback on what was needed to make future holiday makers happy!

I've just done a search for "crow glove puppet" and they are available from amazon.co.uk

Tony - pebble art is lots of fun and as we left the pebbles there and only took photos its pretty easy to store too! I did do a sculpture course once and discovered the main drawback is storage for finished works...

Jo - the crow says you have extraordinary good taste!

GreenishLady said...

Ah! Such wonderful photos - they transported me to Scotland. I feel I've had a mini-mini-break in that cottage, and I love the faces in the rocks around the waterfall. I'm seeing more and more when i look at the photo on flickr. Thanks for sharing your holiday with us!

Caroline said...

Greenishlady - thank you - Jim's photo of the waterfall is good isn't it!

neena maiya (guyana gyal) said...

Ahhh, still looking at the photos. What a lovely place.

That crow. And that cow. We need some here :-D

Caroline said...

GG - thanks!