Bees & Thistle
Today we took mum to Ardgillan Castle, which is an amazingly disorganized place. Supposedly the first tour starts at 11:00am, but when we arrived the sign said "next tour 1:30". Whoops! We asked at the cafe and they said it was wrong, and "just sit yourselves down and the guide will be along in a bit". So we sat, and then they took us to another room and we sat in there for a while, and eventually a guide turned up and gave us an excellent tour.
We decided to have some lunch at the cafe, which was totally disorganized and took a good half an hour for us to get our food, mostly spent standing at the cash register while all the people in the queue behind us got served first. Odd.
The castle itself is kind of odd too: huge grounds with lots of picnickers essentially run as a park, and the castle operated as cafe-and-holistic-health-centre. And tours, on demand.
Out the back, as part of the free park there was a lovely walled garden too (a little overgrown and... odd), where there were scotch thistles exhibiting their full 3m+ height which the bumblebees seemed to be absolutely adoring.
Overall a quirky place, and definitely worth a visit, but probably better to eat elsewhere.