Tea for three

I've been past Dolly's Tea Room in Roslin quite a few times over the years but had never actually been in.  It always looked popular though, often with various bicycles parked outside, even on a dreich day like today.  And so I had lunch there with Mum and Dad, and enjoyed a very good panini and salad.

I had at first presumed Dolly was someone called Dorothy, perhaps the original owner of the establishment which was built in 1868, by the crossroads in the village, as the Royal Hotel, "to accommodate the stream of day-trippers from Edinburgh following in Sir Walter Scott's footsteps".  Some of the streets in the village are named after characters in his novels, just as Edinburgh Waverley railway station was named after his Waverley novels.  The hotel is now divided into the tea room and the Chapel Cross Guesthouse.

Dolly, however, was of course Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal that was successfully cloned, at the Roslin Institute in 1996.  Although she lived for only six years she had several lambs, and her body was preserved – you can see her at the National Museum of Scotland.