By Tina Fox
The east coast just below Edinburgh is an interesting area, but just that bit too far for day trips. So we decided to have 2 nights at Eyemouth to have more time to explore.
It was a nice day for travelling, so we set off quite early and had our first stop for coffee at the sleepy border town of Selkirk. It has a lot of history including a famous courtroom.
After a short break we pressed on to Coldstream, another small but attractive town with a good craft gallery. We then went on to Berwick on Tweed, back in England, for lunch and a potter around the shops.
By sheer good luck we found an excellent veggie café, Kazmiranda, upstairs from a music shop. Very quirky but good food at reasonable prices. My other half had a spicy dish, which he enjoyed, but I just had something simple and saved myself for the excellent puds. Nothing was too much trouble here for the staff who amended dishes to suit our taste preferences with a lot of goodwill. Highly recommended.
We then went on another 10 miles or so back into Scotland to our home for 2 nights, the Anchorage in Eyemouth. This was a B&B that looked pretty unprepossessing from the outside. But we need not have worried. It was lovely inside and the hostess, Janice, could not have been more welcoming. She had gone to trouble to ensure we had a choice of three kinds of veggie sausage for our breakfast and was happy to provide Earl Grey and coffee bags for our room as well as the standard tea. Sadly she could not do anything about the incredibly noisy seagulls who called all night long and kept us awake despite the double glazing.
We had our evening meal at the New Inn just down the road in Coldingham. We had a vegetable gratin dish because there were only two veggie dishes on the menu. This got a star for being home-made but we felt it was very overpriced – £8.50 for a few vegetables in a tomato sauce topped with sliced potato and cheese.
The next day we did a little drive around the coastal and inland areas in the district. We started with Haddington, which is an attractive town with good shops and nice historical buildings (and a museum). After this we had a brief stop at the seaside town of Gullane, then went on to North Berwick, one of our favourite little towns in the area. There is a seabird centre here due to the nearby Bass Rock sanctuary, but no noise! It also has lots of cafés and interesting independent shops. We discovered a lovely arts and crafts garden. We found all the public gardens and planting in the area to be lovely – subtle colours of pinks and greys and not a horrid corporate begonia in sight. The North Berwick area must have a good budget for its garden areas. Nothing exciting to report on the food front, though North Berwick does have a wonderful ice cream shop!
On Friday, after another of Janice’s excellent breakfasts, it was back home via Edinburgh. It only took us an hour to get there, which was good because it gave us plenty of time for the National Museum of Scotland.
The museum has a wonderful and well put-together exhibition, ‘The Celts’, on at the moment. Many of the pieces I have only see in books before, but the real thing is so much more impressive. The café at the museum is also good with interesting vegetarian choices, but we were a little too early for lunch.
Eventually, after more wandering around, we decided to eat at Villa Rustica on Hanover Street. I had originally fancied Henderson’s, the historic vegetarian restaurant, but sadly the choices were nearly all spicy and I don’t get on with spicy food.
The restaurant we went to was very reasonable at £7.95 for three courses, all of which had a reasonable veggie choice, so it was not just pizza.
The weather continued to be good (lucky us!) so we drove down to the Morningside area for a potter around the interesting shops there. We went food shopping on our way back home – arriving very tired from lack of sleep, but content with an interesting few days.
