This post contains quite a few more pictures than normal so I’ve made them a little smaller then usual; all of them are clickable to see bigger versions. Some of the pictures are snippets of the whole image and are still at the resolution at which they were taken, so they are a little grainy I’m afraid.
Sunday
After getting up very late and having a lazy breakfast, we had to decide what we were going to do for the day. The lady who owned the hotel had already given us the low-down on the best place to go for fish and chips and the best bar for getting a view of the St Andrews golf course but we still needed something to do for the day.
Browsing through the literature in the room, I found a leaflet for the Scottish Deer Park that was just a few miles away, and off we went. After getting a little lost and some really jammy luck, we managed to find the place. On the way in I bought one of the bags of deer feed, because I just can’t resist feeding cute animals.
The park consisted of several large fields of deer with grassy paths all around them. For each field there were information boards with details of the deer to be seen within. Despite the fact that they were quite lively Wookie managed to get several pictures:
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The park also had a wolf enclosure with scheduled feeding times so we waited for the show. The ranger who conducted the talk was informative and funny and the wolves themselves were wonderful. The food consisted of rabbits with the heads removed. This was so that the little kiddies weren’t too upset by the sight of these big beasts crunching up cute little bunnies, but quite frankly the kids were loving it, and it was mostly the parents that were squeaming about the whole thing. The wolves certainly knew when to come out for dinner; these pictures were taken about half an hour before feeding time:
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As well as the deer and the wolves, they had birds of prey. Most of these were out on display in an enclosure during the day but they also had displays schedule, so we stayed for one of those too. Seeing them all sitting still on their perches was nice, but nothing compares to seeing them in action. The first of these was a Harris Hawk:
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I can’t remember what the other one was but it was a lot smaller and faster than the Harris, I had several attempts at getting a picture of it flying and this was the best of the lot:
So, I had to get a close up:
These were the only two we saw flying out of the many that they had. Several of them were owls, including this big fella:
After handing over the crumbs from the bag of food to the last deer we saw, we headed out to get some dinner.
The fish and ship shop that we had been recommended was in the village of Anstruther and was quite easy to identify by the massive queue outside. In the end we queued for 55 minutes to get two fish suppers, which were definitely very good, but I’m not sure they were worth the wait.
We then made our way to the 19th hole of the Jubilee course for a couple of wee drinkies and then wandered down on to the main beach for a stroll. This beach was the one used in the film Chariots of Fire and once you get down onto it you can see why, it goes on forever.
By now the sun was going down and we saw for ourselves one of the fabulous Scottish sunsets that Gem keeps raving about. This was the view towards St Andrews:
This was the view in the opposite direction:
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