Rambling Russells

Friday 9th Nov. We began our trip at the usual meeting place outside Edinburgh - free coffee Mon - Fri! We then moved on to South Queensferry - the car park just outside gives a lovely view of the bridge. Going into the village itself there was a museum all about the bridges on the main street. What a quaint little place - narrow street with steps up to shops above street level. Having spent some time in the museum we had a wander up and down the street before finding a nice cafe for refreshments. Moving on we crossed the new bridge - busy by this time in the afternoon - to our hotel for the next few days. Sat 10th Nov Sat saw us catching the train from Markinch to Dundee. Ticket office out of action and we were asked if we had our bus passes with us??? There is apparently a special rate for train users if you have a bus pass in Fife. As we did not have a Fife bus pass it was no good to us. The platform taking people to Edinburgh was very busy as there was a ...

A place we had heard of, but never got around to visiting, was Broom Fisheries, near Annan. Well, the weather was perfect this morning - frosty but sunny - so a wander was in order. We knew where we were going but had never been down this particular road before! A narrow, winding  road took us through the old Royal Ordnance Factory site before arriving at Broom Fisheries. Broom Fisheries it turns out is the home to coarse fishing lakes and waters at Newbie, just 2 miles from Annan in beautiful Dumfries & Galloway. The fishery is open from 8am to dusk every day. You may ask - as we did - what is coarse fishing? As I understand it (I think!) coarse fishing is fishing for species of fish that live in freshwater - other than trout and salmon. Broom Fisheries offer the chance to catch barbel, roach, tench, perch, bream, rudd, gudgeon, chub, carp and ide. (Never even heard of ide!) They have records of bream and barbel weighing in at 6lbs and carp at 15lbs! Coarse fishing ...