CASTIGLIONI CHRONOGRAPH WATCH

Greenmen were all over the place in Greyfriars. I did buy one as a souvenir from a great store on the Royal Mile.

Hidden away behind other buildings is one of the gems of Edinburgh's Old Town, the Kirk of the Greyfriars: also known as the Greyfriars Tolbooth and Highland Kirk, or just simply Greyfriars Kirk.

Churches are usually amongst the easiest of buildings to find, announcing their presence with a tower or steeple. Not so Greyfriars Kirk, and as a result finding it takes a little detective work. Your starting point should be the circular stone tower of the beautiful new Museum of Scotland building. Looking across the road to its west you see a pub, Greyfriars Bobby's Bar. To the left of the pub as you look at it is a passageway. It leads into Greyfriars Kirkyard.

The Kirk itself is a beautifully restored yellowish harled barn of a building, sitting amid a surprisingly large space to have been so successfully hidden away in the heart of the Old Town.

Greyfriars was the first church to be built in Edinburgh after the Reformation of 1560, and was built on land granted by Mary Queen of Scots, previously the property of the Franciscan convent in the Grassmarket (hence the name Greyfriars). Building started in 1602, using stone reclaimed from a disused Dominican convent elsewhere in the city, and the kirk opened for business on Christmas Day, 1620.

Greyfriars has an important place in Scottish history. In 1638 the National Covenant was signed here, sparking a series of conflicts that were to last for nearly half a century including, arguably, the English Civil War and certainly the "killing time" of the latter half of the 1600s

In 1679 the Wars of the Covenant returned to Greyfriars, when the South Yard of the kirkyard was used as a temporary prison for 1200 Covenanters awaiting trial. This must have been a remarkably grim prison, shared with the mausoleums that line both sides of the yard, but it is hard to see how it could have been an especially secure one.

Elsewhere in the kirkyard is the Martyrs Monument, erected in 1709 in memory of the Covenanters killed in the 1600s. The rest of the kirkyard contains one of the best collections anywhere of monuments going back to the 1600s. But it is a more recent grave that is one of the most visited in the kirkyard. This is the grave of John Gray, who was an Edinburgh policeman who died of tuberculosis on 15 February 1858 and was buried here. He had a dog, a Skye Terrier called Bobby, and for the following 14 years, until the dog's own death in 1872, Bobby kept watch over John Gray's grave. Hence the name of the pub next to the kirkyard entrance. And hence the statue of a dog in front of the pub.

The interior of Greyfriars Kirk is beautiful and spacious. The church has had an accident prone history, and as a result much of what you see inside is younger than you might expect. For example Greyfriars originally had a tower at its west end. However, the town council used it as a gunpowder store, and in 1718 the inevitable happened. When the west end of the church was rebuilt, the tower was omitted, though space was provided for two separate congregations.

In 1845 fire destroyed much of the older part of the church and badly damaged the newer part. The rebuilding took until 1857 to complete, and included the first addition of stained glass windows to any Scottish parish church since the Reformation nearly three hundred years earlier. Robert Louis Stevenson's 1897 observations on Greyfriars in Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes can be read here.

It was only with a major restoration between 1931 and 1938 that the two halves of Greyfriars Kirk were reunited under a magnificent new ceiling of Californian redwood.

song:
alejandro (Skrillex remix) - lady gaga
THE BEGINNING...IS AWESOME
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pic info:
i'm too lazy to get my camera and take pictures...so editing old stuff, da?

OH the lyrics are from what i heard from the song 'California (sound drop RMX) by DATAROCK
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today:
- almost fainted in math class...glad i didn't ><

- i'm kind of scared now...some total d***head loser was a total i**** and hit me over the head while attempting to throw this guy's hard drive ...i got hit damn hard on the head and my friend on their shoulder...the scary thing is, i didn't feel A.N.Y.T.H.I.N.G. no pain or anything! i just walked away with a 'wtfh you f***ing idiot* look...HOPE THAT B**** HAS A TERRIBLE DAY TOMORROW D:<

- guess who's the silleh who forgot Kuroshitsuji/Black Butler had a second season -_-
i think i'll watch them ALL after exams...or next month :D

- WELL time to study science...T-T

- who knew it took will power to pick up something you got from Free Comic Book Day and read THE WHOLE THING
it's a few days since and i havent read ANYTHING i got from that day ...I HAVENT EVEN FINISHED 1 MANGA FROM THE STORE! WTH IS WRONG WITH THIS

- beautiful trash

- this person who follows me so i follow back is spamming my tumblr dashboard with pictures and stuff from a certain celebrity i dislike...WTH DO I DO?!

- i started listening to songs about sad stuff and ended up listening to dubstep remixes of 'Friday' by Rebecca Black.....WTF
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