Woolly says – We’d reached our last morning in Scotland and with a promised storm on its way to batter the country I hoped that we could get to our two stops before it started.

Leaving our digs in Dumfries we took the short drive to the small town of Lockerbie. A strange place to stop but one that Jo wanted to go to.

Lockerbie is known internationally as the place where, on 21st December 1988, the wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103 crashed after a terrorist bomb on board detonated. In the United Kingdom, the event is often referred to as the “Lockerbie disaster” or the “Lockerbie bombing”. Eleven residents of the town were killed in Sherwood Crescent, where the aircraft’s wings and fuel tanks plummeted in a fiery explosion, destroying several houses and leaving a large crater, with debris causing damage to other buildings nearby. All 259 people on the flight also died. The 270 total victims were citizens of 20 different nations. The event remains the deadliest terrorist attack and aviation disaster in Britain.

As we were traveling so close to the town it seemed appropriate to stop and show our respects.

Woolly says – Dryfesdale Cemetery was quiet as we walked through towards the Garden of Remembrance and Lockerbie Air Disaster Memorial. Such a tranquil place made it harder to understand how something like this could have happened. We took our time looking at the memorial stones for the crew of the aircraft, the thirty five American students from Syracuse University returning home for Christmas after studying at the university’s London campus.

The large granite stones at the end of the garden was huge with each name etched on to remember them all. It was a very moving place and full of sorrow.

We wandered back to the car in silence before setting the sat nav for our last destination in Scotland, one that is right on the border between countries and is world famous for weddings!

Gretna’s “runaway marriages” began in 1754 when Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act came into force in England. Under the Act, if a parent of a person under the age of 21 objected to the minor’s marriage, the parent could legally veto the union. The Act tightened the requirements for marrying in England and Wales but did not apply in Scotland, where it was possible for boys to marry at 14 and girls at 12 with or without parental consent. In the 1770s, with the construction of a toll road passing through the tiny village of Graitney, that Gretna Green became the first easily reachable village over the Scottish border. The blacksmiths in Gretna became known as “anvil priests”, with Richard Rennison (1889 to 1969), performing 5,147 ceremonies in his lifetime. Today although the laws have changed in both England and Scotland Gretna’s two blacksmiths’ shops and countless inns are still the place of tens of thousands of weddings.

The car park was busy with coaches already vying for space, we headed through the archway from the parking and into the Greta Green tourist area. Plenty of shops to choose from selling shortbread by the tonne and enough highland cow fridge magnets to cover a house, we popped our heads into one and retreated once we had realised how crowded they were.

Small statues and photo opportunities were everywhere for the brides and grooms to have their picture taken.

The original blacksmiths shop was busy conducting a wedding, but we were able to head into the Gretna Green experience where my luck was in and I was able to achieve one of my Scottish goals, meeting a man in a kilt.

The experience was rather good explaining about the laws in Scotland on marriage and a ceremony known as the handfasting that had made them legal spouses and is where the phrase ‘tying the knot’ came from.

A wall of portraits told us about the anvil priests and priestesses that had carried out the weddings as well as a coach that had arrived here with two elopers.

Small rooms were filled with the tools of the blacksmiths trade with two rooms set up with the famous anvil for the nuptials to come.

A display of the licenses issued sat next to a flower adorned carriage and just as we were about to admire another case of information a lady appeared and asked us to leave as a wedding was coming in, I scurried through the door where I found a double sided mirror where we could watch the wedding without them seeing us, this felt a bit odd to all of us so we headed into the last part of the exhibition where the stories of some of the people who had eloped were told.

Back outside my kilted man was now blowing his bagpipes and having donated some coins to his box we sat down for a warming drink and some cookies to keep us going on our journey back.

Walking back to the carpark we found a courtship maze which Handsome Jack couldn’t resist and have spent the next twenty minutes getting lost we finally left the maze and found the car.

It was a nice stop off but very commercialised, not a place I would want to marry in but each to their own. With seat belts on we headed to the motorway and the gale force winds and slanting rain that we would drive through for the next four and a half hours. Scotland had been amazing, the only thing that had been missing was the sighting of highland cows and wild haggis!