Garden of Cosmic Speculation. Every year Liv and I keep saying we’re going to explore Scotland and check out more events and things to see. One of those things we’ve always wanted to see but never quite got around to doing (for various) is to visit the Garden of Cosmic Speculation close to Dumfries.

Garden of Cosmic Speculation? What’s that? Why are you so keen to check it out? Well it’s a private garden located just outside of Dumfries (almost a two hour drive from Edinburgh) and the garden is only for one day a year on the 30th April. The pictures we’ve seen online look pretty awesome and we’ve had some really nice weather over the last few days so we woke up in decent time and headed over.

I mentioned about checking out other events, today was the day of the Beltane Fire Festival here in Edinburgh but after four hours of driving and me having my final course exams this Wednesday I really couldn’t go. I’m also really busy trying to finish off a ceilidh I photographed a week ago at the fabulous Carberry Tower which I’ll share this week and I photographed a really awesome 1 hour wedding this past Friday so one event is a stretch, two impossible.

So the Garden of Cosmic Speculation. This is a privately owned garden owned by Charles Jencks that resides just a few miles outside of Dumfries. The gardens take around two hours to walk around and they are dog friendly and really fantastic for children. My daughter had a mental time running up then rolling down the hills and she was absolutely shattered by the time we got back to the car. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves but we were there for around three hours and while I really enjoyed it, it’s probably something I’d only check out once.

Notes about the one day out at the Garden of Cosmic Speculation. It took just under two hours to drive there from Edinburgh. It was a really direct drive and apart from the odd plonker on the road it was a good drive. Once we got there it took 1 hour to get in the site! The organisers had to clear people out of the site before they could allow more in so we waited for an hour and we watched everyone have picnics in their cars or at the side of the road (us included). Once we got there, we parked in a field, walked five minutes and we were in. It was £10 per adult and Amelia was free. Major complaint of the day, apart from the wait getting in, was the toilets. The toilet situation was absolutely dire. We had to wait nearly an hour in a queue to get in the toilets. This was really bad!

If not for being a fairly special day and the site being someone’s residence I probably would have said “sod it” and peed in the woods, but we couldn’t, so we waited. There also weren’t really any refreshments apart from tea but this was stated clearly on their website so no complaints there. Just make sure you take your own food and drink.

It was quite cool seeing the above train. You can climb inside and have a look around but it’s really rusty inside. One group of children before us jumped in and had a run around but I picked Amelia up to have a look inside and she flat out refused to go in.

We saw the above two bumps and both Liv and I said at the same time “that looks like an ass”. We were checking out a wee bridge just as Millie tried to climb it and there was a notice at the bottom of the bumps saying “don’t climb the buttocks”. Brilliant!