On the same trip on which we visited both Dirleton and Hailes Castles (we do tend to pack a lot in) we sandwiched in a visit to Tantallon Castle, which stands on a promontory east of North Berwick in East Lothian.

Though a ruin it’s a seriously impressive structure:-

Information board:-

It’s a fair walk from the car park and Castle shop up to the castle. Approach:-

Entrance:-

Within the walls:-

The courtyard is now a grassy space:-

Far right-side wall:-

The Firth of Forth’s most prominent island, the Bass Rock, lies just off the coast here:-

Part of castle-:-

It’s possible to climb up to the top of the castle. Its a long way down!:-

Fireplaces on different levels:-

What looked like  like World War 2 gun emplacements or the buildings that served them lay just to the west:-

A good position to protect the Firth of Forth from sea attack. East Lomond Hill and Largo Law can be seen on the far side.:-

Abut a year ago we decided to take a walk to try to find the Barrel Brig, an old bridge over the River Ore in Fife. It had been featured in a calendar we had of local scenes but we’d never seen it.

It’s not on the beaten track and we had to walk quite a distance from where we parked in Coaltown of Balgonie. The start of the path has a view over to Balgonie Castle (on the left of this photo):-

It turned out to be a longer walk than we had expected along muddy roads/paths and over a disused railway line before finally seeing the River:-

It was still a couple of hundred metres or so before we saw the brig itself:-

The path curves round to the brig:-

You can see it’s not a modern thoroughfare:-

Before taking that shot I did scout down to the bank to grab this photo:-

We then strolled across the (unparapeted) bridge to get the opposite angle:-

On the way back to the car I took this shot over the fields to Largo Law in the distance:-