Lunch at Floors Castle
Notes from the saddle - NCN 1 stage 14.
The table next door
After the eventful night in Berwick upon Tweed, this morning has been a perfectly dull one through drizzle and carefully managed countryside. Rooks have kraa-ed and the sycamores which are scattered throughout the land have looked stately dressed in their autumnal British Racing Green. Their cloud canopy would have matched those in the sky were it not for the carefully ironed cloth which has hung up there all morning. Fields have been cropped and now are golden stubble and are being picked about by pigeons. Sparrow hawks have been on patrol. Near Eccles, a tractor was parked in the middle of the field, its plough carefully poised mid-air, whilst the driver a young lad, sat in the cab staring at his phone.
It is time for a break having pedalled all morning. Sheltering in an old bus shelter, I scan the map for likely places and chose Floors Castle, where the website tells me; ‘Designed by the Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe’s personal Chef, our menus make the most of seasonal and local Scottish produce. Situated next to the beautiful Walled Garden at Floors, The Terrace Café offers a fresh garden café atmosphere.”
I arrive, park the bike, put on a jacket, for its is cold. A waitress greets me.
’Do you have a reservation?’ she asks.
’What? for the cafe? I need a reservation for a cafe? I ask rather too bluntly.
‘Aye. We are fully booked for the moment, but if you wait here I’ll see what I can do’.
She’s away for a while. I stand near the doorway in dripping lycra whilst couples warmly and sensibly clothed glance at me from their tables, trying hard not to make a face of disapproval. Some succeed, some don’t. A lady with a large hairy dog sitting beside her looks at me, and turns to her partner, who looks up and smirks in my direction. The young waitress returns saying that she has found me a table outside.
It is drizzling still.
We walk towards the table she has identified, passing many others unoccupied which are under cover. ‘These?’ I ask, ‘are they free?’.
‘All reserved I’m afraid’, she says as we walk to the furthermost, almost in the flowerbeds.
There’s a long wait for a menu. An even longer one for soup and quiche. I content myself by looking up collective nouns for birds. There have been this morning, a ‘confusion of chiff-chaffs, a ‘parliament of crows’, a ‘trembling of finches’ and a ‘quarrel of sparrows’ along the neat and tidy hedgerows.
As I eat it stops drizzling and the next door table is filled by a tall old man with a shepherd’s crook and a younger man, perhaps his son, along with three women covering the generations from old to nearly young. They order cake and tea and pass the time in fragmented conversation. There are long silences where the triangles of cake are carefully studded and cut with a fork. They finish. Silence holds them, when, scraping his chair against the gravel, the old man, who’s done a lot of listening rises, leaning heavily on his crook. The older woman opposite him, who has said nothing herself, rises too.
’Well we must be off then’ says the old man, smiling. His hand hovers in the air in farewell. The others nod and smile and wave.
The old couple have crunched a few steps towards the garden’s borders when the middle-aged woman, wearing an acid green coat, says very loudly, ‘Thank God they’ve gone’. The others laugh a little too forcefully.
The old woman hears - she could not but hear pauses mid-step, thinks about turning before putting her arm into the fold of the old man’s bent elbow. He leans on his crook, she leans her head against his shoulder and together then shuffle off. The speaker turns to me smiling, her face a picture of triumph.
To access the Ride notes and downloadable map for Stage 14 of the National Cycle Way Route 1, click here
