Ten minutes up the road and we are at Falkland Palace and gardens. This is still considered to be a royal palace and there was a hunting lodge on this site as early as the twelfth century. We are there for opening time and historical interpreters are assembling to accompany a school party. I don’t want to be picky but we quickly spot a watch, twenty-first century footwear and an unauthentic hairstyle. I shouldn’t judge though, as Mistress Agnes has had to resort to glasses, following two unpleasant contact lens related incidents. I was therefore pleased to see that ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ was also wearing glasses. In my defence I have made some attempt to make Mistress Agnes’ look vaguely old fashioned. I wanted proper re-enactor’s frames but the optician refused to put lenses into anything but their own frames, so I had to settle for the nearest I could get.

We spend our visit playing dodge the school party. The building was extended in the sixteenth century by James IV and improved further by James V, using French architects, hence the resemblance to a chateau. It seems that the influence of his wife, Mary of Guise, was at work here. His daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, spent time at the palace and we were able to view what is allegedly the oldest real tennis court in the world that is still in use; it dates from 1539.

A great deal of damage was done during the ‘English’ Civil War (which was not exclusively English at all), when Cromwell’s troops were billeted here and the banqueting hall wing was destroyed by fire. The Marquis of Bute was responsible for the nineteenth century restorations and the twentieth century hereditary keepers of the palace were the Crichton-Stuart family. The palace contains a functioning Roman Catholic chapel and is the only royal residence to do so.

The palace has adopted an effective method of preventing visitors from sitting on the chairs, each one has a sprig of holly placed on it! No photographs were allowed inside but I was particularly taken with the painted ceilings and the tapestry depicting a British woodland, compete with parrot! They also have an apothecary’s room and a physic garden. The gardens as a whole are beautiful and several gardeners are hard at work. They were designed in the 1940s by Percy Cane who also designed palace gardens in Addis Ababa.

This is meant to be a relaxing ‘chill out’ holiday so the remainder of the afternoon was spent sitting in the sunshine on site, planning next year’s trip to Ireland.