Continued from Part 2…
On Monday morning, we woke up nice and early again, got another hearty breakfast, and set off to explore. First stop was Kilmarnock, a slightly larger town than Ayr just a short drive North. The town wasn’t very nice itself, it was fairly run-down with a lot of empty shops. There was some fairly interesting graffiti around though.
Other than just exploring the town, we also came here to have a walk around Dean Castle and Country Park, which was a beautiful little nature reserve. There were lots of deer, a couple of llamas, and lots of other animals, all in little enclosures around the castle between the stream and wooded area. A very nice little park in the middle of the town.
I should mention at this point, that Helen took it upon herself (I may have suggested it) to lie down at the top of a small hill and roll to the bottom while no-one was looking!
After Kilmarnock, we had a little search and found a nice castle to the South that served afternoon tea. We booked a table there for the mid-afternoon (it was roughly a 90 minute drive, so we thought better be on the safe side), and set off on our journey.
On the way, we passed a remote ruin of an old Abbey out in the countryside which was a really lucky find! Crossraguel Abbey was a large 13th century Abbey. Interestingly, the abbey was built by order of a lord (not a bishop), as a previous donation to the church to build such an abbey was mostly pocketed by monks, who instead built themselves a small chapel nearby.
I climbed all the way to the top of the tower, but Helen wanted to explore more of the ground floor. There wasn’t much up there other than a little model of one of the houses and a lovely view of the surrounding countryside.
The man looking after the site was very nice, we had a chat about Dunure and Culzean castles that we’d visited the day before. He told us how to properly pronounce Culzean (“culane”), and a few other interesting tidbits.
After a good look round, we got back on the road and continued South to Glenapp Castle for our afternoon tea. Unfortunately as we were arriving, I started to feel unwell. I had a chat with the manager and apologised that we wouldn’t stay for food, but we at least had a short walk around the grounds before heading back to the hotel.
When we got back to Ayr, we rested in the hotel room for a couple of hours before deciding on room service for dinner as I didn’t feel up to eating at a restaurant. The room service was surprisingly good though, and more than enough to keep us going. Later on, we took another walk down to the beach to clear our heads one last time before going home in the morning. Helen went for another paddle while I stayed out of the water, then we finally retired for the evening, exhausted from miles and miles of walking. The second picture below is the view from our hotel room, you can see it was just a stones-throw from the beach.
In the morning, after breakfast, we had another walk down to the beach and back before checking out, then headed home, arriving back in Middlewich around lunch time.