Retreat to Keyshill

Keyshill Farm, the main house.

After a couple extra days in Edinburgh, we made our way to the western side of Scotland to visit my cousins in Ayrshire, south of Glasgow. I have mentioned their farm in multiple blog posts, including this one and this one from last April and then this one, this one, and this one from December 2009. Since the snow storms were continuously hitting the eastern side of Scotland from Aberdeen to Edinburgh, everything over there had been slow to recover; Glasgow's airport had yet to close since the snow in the west had been lighter. Some friends had already taken the hour-long train ride from Edinburgh to Glasgow so that they could go ahead and fly and not wait for the Edinburgh airport to open back up. Going west seemed like a good idea for us, too.

Originally, we weren't going to see any of my cousins in Ayrshire because of time constraints. Even if they could have gone to St Andrews for the graduation ceremony, they would have been stuck in the snow while they had work to do on the farm. Therefore, it was nice to get to the other coast and see the cousins before I had to fly back home. I'm not sure when I'll see them again. Though the snow had been lighter around Glasgow and south of the town, the day after we arrived to Keyshill Farm near Stair brought a heavy snow that blanketed the entire area. News reports from the BBC said that the highways around Glasgow were a complete disaster. People waited for up to 7 hours or more on the freeway since the government hadn't done an adequate job of getting everything ready for the snow. There weren't enough police officers or fire fighters working the roadways to help passengers, who were stranded for hours. The Scottish Minister of Transport, Stewart Stevenson, said that the government response had been a top notch job. He later apologize for that assessment when everyone knew someone had botched up. He tried to blame the weather reporters for not forecasting a heavy snow so that the government could get the salt and grit onto the roads. The next day the BBC showed the forecasters predicting the heavy snow over and over again while playing the official's excuse for the horrible road conditions. The next couple of days it seemed as if everyone stayed put and didn't bother to risk getting stuck on the roads.

As I have said before, my great-grandmother worked at Keyshill Farm near Stair in Ayrshire before she immigrated to Pennsylvania, so my cousin's farm has special meaning for my family. It's always nice to see the countryside where my family has lived and still lives. The heavy snows and thick clouds covered up the Isle of Arran most of the time so that we couldn't see it mountainous skyline, but all the snow over the fields made nice photographs.

View of Keyshill Farm during sunset.

Road beside Keyshill Farm during sunset.

The house is on the left in the distance.