Melrose Abbey

Though this was the last major abbey we saw I will start with it because it was in the town we stayed. Just two blocks from our hotel was Melrose Abbey, which turned out to be by far the most impressive of the ruins.



Melrose is nothing short of massive. In ruins like these you often find no roof, a general structure remaining so that you can try to imagine what it looked like, and maybe a couple of really old tombstones. Melrose on the other hand had a roof covering part of the building, as well as a spiral staircase going all the way to the top so that you could look out over the whole place. Not only that, but as you will see below, there were still sculptures remaining - which is unheard of in a ruin like this. Melrose was evidently an impressive display of detail by John Morow from France (who evidently was brought up as an expert stone mason). The detail that still exists is staggering, including a bag-pipe playing pig near the top of one of the walls!



Above you can see the portion of the nave without the roof and the foothills in the backdrop with low cloud cover. It was an unusual day with the weather (well, not that unusual!), but we were able to stay dry for most of our time here. Below you see how large of a building it was. Ever since we got here I have said that if Scotland's cathedrals were still in tact no one would have ever heard of Notre Dame (but I digress).



Below you can see some of the statutes atop the buttresses. There were a couple of these on that side and some in the inner part of the abbey (of Peter and Paul).



The graveyard had some pretty cool looking crosses, this being one of our favorites.