Thursday 3rd September

The plan today was to drive north to Ayr and visit Culzean castle, there are some other places that we wanted to have a look at but thought we'd just wait and see how the time goes.

The best laid plans etc. in the end we didn't go out until 1pm and decided to have another look at a village we quite like the look of, it's called Moniave and sits about 18 miles north of Dumfries. I am not yet seriously looking at property to purchase but had seen a property for sale in this village quite a while ago, today we thought we would drive past and see how it sat in the village and what we could expect for our investment. As it happened someone was working in the garden when we arrived so being the sort of person I am I got out and started chatting to the gardener, who turned out to be the owner. In fact we spent a good half an hour chatting, it turns out they moved here from North Wales only about 5 miles from where we live now. He was able to give us a lot of information about the area and we brought him up to date about the area he had left (some 8 years ago). 

From there we travelled on to Thornhill, a delightful small town with shops and even a bank, believe me when I tell you there are many, many villages here with neither. Then the journey took on all the aspects of a mystery tour, with no map we headed in the general direction we wanted to be and pushed on. It turned out to be a lovely drive with spectacular views. We travelled around Loch Doon and then on through Galloway forest, the roads were deserted and I reckon we only saw three other cars in over 50 miles! We arrived back in Kirkcudbright about 9.30pm.

So we never did get to Culzean Castle, but never mind there's always next time :-)

Yesterday's back Blip

More pics on my Flickr page here.