9am depart. 13* a beautiful sunny day. We braked sharply at some stage to allow a mother Pheasant & her brood to meander the road, they farm & release to shot here, do we?

We wandered over to Culross, (pronounced Kur-Ross), the reverse travel to what we did yesterday afternoon, which by the way was 15* - 17* all day. We thought the Palace didn’t open until 10am, nah, opening time was 11am. The lady in the ticketing shop gave us a map of the village and walked us to some steps to set us off. We were so pleased, what a delightful place. 

4 yrs ago when Nina & Richard were travelling the UK (Happy 70th Nina, we did remember you on the 28th!), I emailed them and told them of Culross, I had watched a tv programme on the town. “During the 20th century, it became recognised that Culross contained many unique historical buildings and the National Trust for Scotland has been working on their preservation and restoration since the 1930s” I think they enjoyed their visit as much as we did. It is a favourite film & tv location, recently being used in the outlander series.

Grangemouth/Polmont where we were staying has a massive oil refining plant practically at our back door. IENSO Grangemouth represents INEOS’ largest manufacturing site by volume of products. It is also home to Petroineos, Scotland’s only crude oil refinery and produces the bulk of fuels used in Scotland. Our products are used extensively in the petrochemical industry and transformed into bottles and pipes, cabling and insulation, food packaging and are used in the pharmaceutical industry.  The Grangemouth refinery and petrochemicals facility is INEOS’ largest production centre. It is a deeply integrated site exploiting synergies between the refinery and the petrochemicals plants. Located 40 kilometres west of Edinburgh on a 1700-acre site, the petrochemicals facility manufactures over 2 million tonnes of chemicals products per annum and the refinery has an annual capacity of 10 million tonnes.

19* 11.30 off to St Margaret's cave Dunfermline.