Helps Celtic Mission

Holyrood Dawn The Edinburgh we love: This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks your heart again and again .        -- Alexander McCall Smith The view above is Holyrood Park in the early morning, but we have seen a thousand vistas just as beautiful. We have commented before on travelling through the countryside and sweeping around a bend to be astonished and delighted by profusions of green and blue and yellow. The last was a surprise to us, we didn't realize how much bright yellow there was, especially in the Spring. The yellows come from huge fields of rapeseed, braes covered in gorse, fields of daffodils, and verges bright with an honour guard of dandelions. Daffodils Dandelions Gorse Rapeseed These expanses of yellow are offset by a profusion of tiny flowers in the grass in a multitude of colours. But there is lots of green, and of course, trees in abundance. D...

I (Richard)  was taking an early morning stroll up past Canongate Kirk and passed the poet, Robbie Ferguson's statue.  I decided to step into the kirkyard to revisit the inscription Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about his fellow-author. The usual way through to the grave was blocked by construction and I was forced to go all the way around the church. As I rounded the back corner the name "Peddie" on a gravestone caught my eye.  William Peddie is the name of my ancestor, the Stirling Castle fort major from the 21st Foot, and also a current dead-end in our family history research in the 1800's, so  I needed to at least read this gravestone. William's death record tells us his father was Robert but we knew nothing about him. Imagine my excitement when I read the following: SACRED To the Memory of James Peddie Captn in the 21st Reg of Foot (Royal N. B. Fusiliers) Who died here on the 17th Novr. 1818 Aged Eighty This Stone is erected by his ...