In May last year we took another visit to the Cowden Japanese Garden, near Dollar, Clackmannanshire. Beautiful as ever.

Pavilion, pond and bridge:-

I particularly like the Zen Garden:-

Seen from distance looking back:-

Closer (and reverse) view of the bridge:-

There was  new garden area this time, accessed by a path:-

Castle Campbell lies in the hills above Dollar, Clackmannanshire, at the top of Dollar Glen. We visited it in October 2019.

The road leading up to it is quite narrow and the car park is a shortish walk away from the castle itself.

It wasn’t busy the day we went but it may be more so in summer.

Castle Campbell from path:-

Part of castle (with loggia):-

Information board in courtyard:-

Former Great Hall:-

Castle gable:-

Doorway from courtyard to grounds:-

Castle from grounds below:-

A vaulted ceiling:-

This ceiling has two carvings of faces that look a bit like the Green Man. There are holes at the mouths and it’s thought that lamps probably hung from there:-

Part of roof:-

Information board on the history of the Campbell family:-

View down to Dollar and the valley of the River Forth beyond:-

I’ve just trawled through all my re-entered posts and I think I’ve fixed the problems with the formatting. This took a lot of trial and error. Deep joy.

I had to take out several stray commands that had crept in plus resize the pictures (again!) on my Dollar War Memorial post. The second and third pages now look okay – at least on my computer.

On Saturday we ended up at Dollar, Clackmannanshire.

This is Dollar’s WW2 memorial, situated in a small memorial gardens just off the main A 91 road. The gardens side has two names for servicemen killed in Northern Ireland. There was no sign of any First World War names.

We walked up the hill beside the burn, over which there are two nice bridges.

The white building behind the second one houses Dollar Museum, which contains, among other things, a display on the Devon Valley Railway (now sadly defunct, victim of the greatest act of institutional vandalism in Britain in my lifetime, the Beeching cuts, though the part to Alloa has been reopened recently.)

We asked the attendant if there was a WW1 memorial anywhere and were told it was in the school grounds.

Of course, Dollar Academy. Lots of former pupils would have served in the wars. The memorial is unusual, showing a figure with outstretched hands.

The main school building can be seen in the first photo. The side facing it seemed to contain names from the parish rather than FPs. Other sides were reserved solely for ex-pupils, with WW2 and later conflicts also commemorated.