A little trip

We took ourselves off for a little outing to Dunfermline on Thursday on the bus, over the bridge to Fife.  (Buses are free to the over-60s.) We'd heard that there was an exhibition of Joseph Noel Paton's paintings in the Carnegie Library, and having only vaguely heard of JNP, wanted to find out more. 

It turned out that he was very famous in his day and was the Queen's (Victoria's) Limner in Scotland. He painted lots of pictures of fairies, because that was very fashionable, but also portraits of his family and other people. 

This one is of his wife and youngest son and is called "Lullaby". It somewhat disregards the fact that the average mother, having got the baby to sleep, would immediately put him down and go and tidy up - or possibly collapse in a heap - rather than balance him precariously on her knee and play the piano to keep him asleep. However, artistic licence and all that. 

The paintings were in a modern extension to the library, which was very nice indeed, and which also houses a museum with various exhibits showing the history of Scotland and specifically of Dunfermline - which was the capital of Scotland between the 11th and 15th centuries. 

Queen Margaret founded a priory here in 1070. As tends to happen, the building got altered a lot over the years, a bit of it was taken over for a palace (now fairly ruined) and an extra church was built on the side two hundred years ago, but there's still quite a lot to see. The extension to the library has lots of glass, with extensive views over the gardens, 

and the Abbey church and precincts. 

You can see Robert the Bruce's name built into the church tower.

By the time we'd finished looking at the exhibition (and had lunch) the Abbey was closing, as was the Palace, so we just had a quick look and will come back another day.

Then we went for a short walk in the adjacent Pittencrieff Park. This was bought by Andrew Carnegie in 1902 and given to the people of Dunfermline. The story is that as a boy, he couldn't play there because the estate was privately owned, so he vowed that one day, he'd buy it. And, once he'd become one of the richest people in the world, he did.