The sun shone! The sky was blue! The people we met at the abbey and palace were lovely and the almond croissants at the Abbot House (the very pink building) were delicious. I was also quietly amused by the addition of a spider to the window depicting Robert the Bruce. Last time we visited Dunfermline we had greater access to the ruins and in case you’re wondering my earlier photographs are all trapped on my misbehaving external hard drive.

The abbey became the burial place for Scottish royalty in the 1100s. St Margaret (the daughter of the Anglo-Saxon Edward the Exile) established the monastery in 1070, on the site where she married King Malcolm. It was enlarged by David I who was the youngest of Margaret’s six sons. David arranged for masons to come from England to complete the building work and appointed Geoffrey, who was Canterbury’s prior, as the first abbot. Even on the eve of the reformation, thanks to David’s devotion to the abbey, where his parents were buried, it was one of the wealthiest foundations in Scotland. It helped that across the centuries pilgrims had come to visit the shrine of Queen Margaret who was canonised in 1249.

Not that matters were always so trouble free. The Scottish Wars of Independence took their toll on the abbey and the town. Alexander III’s three children died before him as did his queen, Margaret, a daughter of King Henry III of England. In an attempt to secure his dynasty he remarried and was in such haste to spend the night with his beautiful young bride took a tumble off a cliff on his way to visit her in 1289 – he was buried at Dunfermline next to his first queen while his grand daughter the Maid of Norway was invited to wear Scotland’s crown. Her premature death in 1290 during her journey to Scotland was the trigger for the Scottish Wars of Independence.

Not far away from the abbey and palace, at Pittencrieff Park, visitors can find Wallace’s Well. William Wallace, he of Braveheart fame (and no he did not father Edward III…even if the Mel Gibson film of 1995 suggests that he did) is supposed to have taken refuge here in 1303 after the Battle of Falkirk. How true the story might be is another matter entirely (it’s the uninspiring mini stone shed with the littler on top of it in the gallery of images). Wallace’s mother is also said to be buried in the churchyard on the northern side of the building and after Wallace’s execution a bit of him made it back to Dunfermline where it was interred with his mother’s remains. Inevitably. Edward I and his court spent some time here as well. Having spent the winter of 1303 at the abbey when he left Dunfermline in May 1304 he gave ordered for the monastery to be burned. Perhaps he heard rumours that the abbot had helped Wallace or perhaps he was just as unpleasant as he can, on occasion, sound.

Robert I financed the rebuilding of Dunfermline’s abbey. The huge new building made an impressive statement as did the rest of Scotland’s programme of monastic construction. After his death, in 1329, Robert was buried there in front of the high altar. His heart is, of course, went on crusade and is interred at Melrose. The Stewarts/Stuarts stayed in the abbey guest house which doubled as a royal residence when they visited. It underwent several remodellings including that of James V at the beginning of the sixteenth century. James VI/I eventually gifted the abbey and its accommodation to his queen, Anne, in 1598 and she turned it into a palace. The queen’s daughter Elizabeth and her son Charles were born here. Her young son Robert was the last of the Stuarts to be buried here in 1602.

After the Stuart kings travelled south Dunfermline’s importance diminished and it gradually turned into a ruin. A new parish church was designed to take the place of the old one at the turn of the nineteenth century. It was in 1818 that Robert the Bruce’s remains were found during building work along with 19 fragments from his tomb.

This year, to celebrate his 750th birthday Historic Scotland commissioned a reconstruction of the famous king’s head based on a scan of the scull found in 1818- although it cannot determine whether the king had leprosy at the time of his death or not. The reconstruction shows him without the illness dressed as he would have been at Bannockburn, while a second digital model makes the same reconstruction but with the effects of leprosy evident. There are no accurate descriptions of the king and, in case you’re wondering, the leprosy accusation came from English sources – and let’s face it, the accusation is a pretty good way of insulting Robert as well as suggesting that God wasn’t happy with him.