Best of the Rest

BEST SAINTLY SITE: In Recommends of 10 September, you mention both St Baldred and North Berwick. Readers may like to know that St Baldred's Church in North Berwick is this year celebrating 1,400 years of St Baldred, a different Celtic saint, who reputedly died in 608AD.

The two saints may have become combined in myth and legend, or the later may have taken his name from the earlier saint to give himself credibility. Whichever it may be, St Baldred's Church has been exploring its patron saint with a small exhibition that has been on display at the library in North Berwick and in the Church this year.

BEST GOLF CLUBHOUSE: I can only assume that your correspondent is not a golfer (Recommends, 17 September). Many elite golf clubs in Scotland are bastions of money, misogyny and snobbery and he has chosen four of them. I have not been to Prestwick Golf Club, but I note that it costs £115 for a round of golf.

To give you some examples, the RBS Golf Society have an annual outing to Muirfield. RBS members are instructed to get ready in their cars, make their way to the first tee, play their round and then change out of golf gear in their cars and drive off.

At Bruntsfield, if you would like a drink, far less lunch or dinner, it is still expected of you to wear a tie and jacket. Royal Burgess has only relatively recently relaxed that rule.

If that is how those clubs wish to operate then so be it, but for it to be suggested that they have the best clubhouses in Scotland is surely stretching the imagination. Golf clubhouses should be welcoming in a relaxed atmosphere with friendly staff and a good variety of choice on the menu. Your correspondent would have been as well naming five exclusive restaurants for all that the average club golfer would know.

BEST SCOTCH PIE: I guess you've already done best Scotch pies at some time or other, but I have to bring your attention to an amazing pie I came across in the wee baker's shop Mathieson's in South Street, Bo'ness. Well, two amazing pies, because there was an offer in the window – "£1.69 for two of our award-winning Scotch pies", so I went for it. I don't know what the award was, but the pies were sublime: pastry that melted in the mouth and full of juicy, tasty meat inside. I finished them in the car outside the shop, and thought to myself: "there is a Pie God." Definitely the best Scotch pie I have ever eaten in several decades of determined pie-searching.

BEST FARM DELI: Craigie's Farm Deli, West Craigie Farm, South Queensferry, 0131 319 1048, www.craigies.co.uk I use Craigie's regularly and find it to be excellent. There is a café with home baking and a farm shop that sells organic food and eggs fresh from the farm. In the summer you can pick berries.

BEST CAFE: Tony's Sunflower Café, Healthy Living Centre, Somerville Street, Glasgow. Lovely quiches with vegetables, tiger bread, mozzarella, daily fresh soup, pasta, spicy Moroccan meatballs and, sometimes, free fruit. It also has pensioners' reductions.

BEST FISHMONGER: Broughtonians (in Edinburgh) are reluctant to invite outsiders into their territory, but as an outsider who creeps in, I'd like to blow their secret sky-high. Something Fishy (16a Broughton Street, 0131-556 7614) would be really hard to beat.

BEST INDIAN RESTAURANT: Voujon, 107 Newington Road, Edinburgh, 0131 667 5046, has superb fresh food, neatly-presented on lovely china by friendly and efficient staff.

BEST SUBJECT FOR A PORTRAIT IN NATIONAL GALLERY: Margaret Keswick Jencks, the original thinker behind the Maggies' Centres, is an original thinker and deserves recognition.

BEST WALK NEAR EDINBURGH: Surely Flotterstone in Midlothian has to be in there.

BEST SCOTS EXPLORER: I would like to nominate William Speirs Bruce, a polar explorer, who led the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition (1902-1904) on the Scotia. Many thanks for Scotsman Recommends, which is always very entertaining.

BEST SMALL TOWN: Melrose – a beautiful Borders town with a wonderful abbey, good hotels and restaurants and a fantastic book festival.

BEST HISTORY SOCIETY: You recently gave a list of history societies, but omitted the best of them – Dunbar and District History Society(www.djma.org.uk/dunbar/ddhs/). Now in its 19th year, the society not only provides a series of talks over the winter months, but also mans the Dunbar Town House Museum History Room where they have amassed a portfolio of some 4,000 photographs of old Dunbar, classified into different sections.They have surveyed the historic parish church graveyard and provided a database of all the graves and are currently working on the church's mort cloths. They provide a point of contact to visitors to the town who have questions about ancestry.

BEST SMALL MUSEUM: John Muir's Birthplace, High Street, Dunbar, 01368 865 899, www.jmbt.org.uk Tells the story and legacy of the great conservationist John Muir, born in the town in 1838. Awarded four stars by VisitScotland, the museum provides both outreach and workshops to schoolchildren and disabled adults in the East of Scotland.The visitors' book contains entries like: "Best small museum I have ever visited" by an Australian, and "why can't we have something like this in the USA" by an American, and "Wow" by a boy from Lancashire.