Discovery Point and V&A Museums (Dundee)

This morning in Dundee, Scotland I did some more wandering along the side of the Firth of Tay and visited a couple of museums, the Discovery Point Museum and the V&A Dundee Museum.

For my morning walk along the shore of the Firth of Tay, I started at roughly the same point as I did yesterday, but I ventured in the opposite direction. Yesterday, I walked a piece seaward. This morning, I walked a bit upstream.

The scenery looks similar in both directions, but walking upstream I had a view of Dundee’s railway bridge until I walked under it, continued a few dozen steps, and turned around and walked back.

There are two bridges across the Firth of Tay, one for trains and one for other traffic. They are separated by quite a distance.

Both bridges are lagely unembelished and unspectacular. They’re flat roadbeds resting on support pillars in the firth, with railings along their sides.

Of the two, I find the rail bridge more attractive. It looks older and it’s evocative. I haven’t decided what it evoked, but it evoked something or other in me. Figuring out what it brought to mind will probably plague me until I forget all about it. That should happen in approximately … Sorry, what were we talking about?

This morning, the tide must have been out. There were kelp-covered, wet sandbars beside the seawall. And I looked over the side of the seawall and saw aquatic plants clinging to the wall.

My impression of the Firth of Tay hasn’t changed from yesterday. It’s very picturesque, but it stops short of splendiforous.

Discovery Museum

The Discovery Point Museum is not a general, wide-ranging voyage of discovery. Instead, it’s a museum dedicated to a ship, The Discovery.

The person who sold me my ticket asked me where I was from. When I responded “Canada,” she said, “Oh, did you know that the Hudson’s Bay Company owned the ship for a time?” “Why, no, I didn’t know that. Thank you.”

It just goes to show, you can leave Canada, but Canada never entirely leaves you.

The Discovery was built in Dundee to explore Antarctica. It set sail in 1901 under the command of Captain Robert Falcon Scott.

After provisioning in some ports along the way, it did indeed make it to Antarctica. There, it got trapped in ice for two winters and the intervening time.

The crew tried to cut and blast its way out of the ice, to no avail. Two rescue ships came and they also failed to forge an escape route. They were about to give up and abandon The Discovery when the sea naturally shifted the ice and created a route out.

After The Discovery returned, it continued to be used as a research ship for a while, but because of financial difficulties, it was sold to the Hudson’s Bay Company. It served as a trading ship from 1905 to 1911 when HBC retired it.

With the start of the First World War, HBC took The Discovery out of retirement and used it to run supplies for the war effort.

After the war, The Discovery again became an oceanography research vessel until 1931 when it entered permanent retirement. Today, The Discovery sits out of the water on a concrete floor beside the Discovery Point Museum, beside the Firth of Tay.

The museum tells the story of The Discovery, Antarctica exploration in general, including other Antartica expeditions and research up to modern times, and the shipbuilding history of Dundee. I forget when shipbuilding in Dundee came to an end.

Boarding The Discovery is included with the price of admission to the museum. I was able to walk on deck and explore below decks.

The museum is small, but there is a short film and a few interactive video displays in addition to the text and visual displays. Between that and the ship I spent well over an hour there.

V&A Dundee Museum

Almost next door to Discovery Point is the V&A Dundee Museum, a Scottish design museum. The architecture is modern and it’s one of the few striking structures I’ve seen in Dundee.

Regular readers can likely easily guess my feelings about design museums. But it’s free and small. And it was right there. So I went in.

The museum contains a Scottish design gallery, which I think might be a permanent exhibit. it displays clothing, some furniture, architectural exhibits, and a few knickknacks.

Another gallery held an exhibit titled “Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World.” It displays photos and videos of cities and people in cities taken for various purposes, including, but not exclusively artistic. I think that was a temporary exhibit.

Yet another gallery featured a special, temporary exhibit titled “Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk” about kimono fashion. There was a fee to see that special exhibition. You don’t really expect me to have bought an entry ticket for something like that, do you? So, you won’t see a description of it here.

Not a Hop-On, Hop-Off Tour

One of my guidebooks recommended a hop-on, hop-off bus tour in Dundee. It’s run by a company that also runs some regular bus routes in the city and beyond, Xplore Dundee. (There are at least two companies that run routes in the city and beyond.) The first stop on the hop-on, hop-off route is right in front of the V&A Dundee Museum. One of the stops on the route is near a sight I planned to see this afternoon. So I decided to use the bus to go there, grab some lunch and then see that sight and then check out the sights on the rest of the route. I bought a ticket for the bus using the company’s app.

I got out of the V&A Museum a little more than five minutes before noon. I waited at the stop, in front of the sign advertising the route and stating that the buses leave there every hour on the hour. I waited until more than ten minutes past noon. The hop-on, hop-off bus still hadn’t arrived.

I found a number for Xplore Dundee and called them. “Sorry, we don’t run the hop-on, hop-off route after September 1.” (Today is September 4.)

“But I already bought a ticket online.”

“If you go to the office they can help you get a refund.”

I didn’t see any online notice on the app when I bought the ticket, which was specifically for the hop-on, hop-off bus, telling me they stopped for the season. What’s more, the promotional sign at the V&A stop didn’t seem to be permanently attached to the ground, so they could have removed it when the season ended. And the app did sell me the ticket despite the bus not running. I had up to 12 months to activate the ticket, so maybe they thought I was going to hold it until they start up the season again, whenever that is.

The hop-on. hop-off ticket also includes rides on any of the company’s other regular bus routes during the hop-on, hop-off validity period (24 hours from the time of validation of the ticket). The company runs a route to a suburb about 30 minutes away by bus that I was planning to go to this afternoon anyway. So, rather than get a refund I used it for that.

It would have been cheaper to buy individual tickets to and from the suburb, but the hop-on, hop-off ticket cost only £12, so I didn’t think it was worth trying to find the office and leap through whatever hoops I’d have to leap through to get a refund. Thank you very much, Xplore Dundee.