A wander around Edinburgh with DivingDaughter

Back in the eighties I lived in Edinburgh for seven years but I'd never walked up Calton Hill. Yesterday I was visiting DivingDaughter who lives there now. We decided to have a look at Calton Hill. I hadn't realised there was so much open space up there. You only see a tiny bit of it all when looking up from Princes Street. Even on a dull day the views were good.

Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags
The Scottish Parliament building is behind the trees at left
The white blob is Our Dynamic Earth conference centre

The Forth estuary, the Isle of May and the "Kingdom of Fife"

Westerly towards the bridges across the Forth

Spaciousness on Calton Hill

I grew up in a small Lancashire Fylde town where change was on a comparatively small scale and felt 'manageable' to my adolescent brain. When visiting London with my family at the age of twelve (we swapped houses with a family my dad knew through his work as a teacher trainer, who wanted a seaside holiday; the Fylde coast is renowned for its seasidiness!) the constant signs of building and change there bothered me. I thought it messy, even ugly. Nowadays I feel a certain excitement when I witness the vitality of a city. It feels like a different 'life-form' from what I'm used to at home on a hill behind a small village in Argyll. Different but fine for all that. I guess it's human adaptability and social organisation that's impressing me now.

The bit of road beyond the hawthorn twigs in the foreground is Princes Street
Edinburgh Castle visible centre

We had hoped to eat lunch at Howies at the bottom when we walked down but it was packed and had a waiting time of about an hour so we wandered off in the direction of Surgeons' Hall and ate in a wee cafe beside it. Not before noticing a 'fruiting' muffin tree in a pot just outside though.

We were struck by the "unengagement" of the person who served us. She was perfectly polite but didn't 'connect', we felt. As DivingDaughter said: "You walked in with a yellow dry bag round your neck!" (it was to protect my camera from what we BoggyBrae-ers call "the falling damps" – not quite rain but not quite not rain either!). I don't think it's just a city thing, this 'unengagement' with customers (we said disengaged first but decided she'd have to have been engaged in the first place to be disengaged) because people 'engage' very readily in Glasgow. Anyway, it was just something we noticed. The soup was very good.

Surgeons' Hall, Edinburgh

After lunch DD found a wee internet cafe without the cafe where I could buy a "grippy" back for my phone. Then we wandered up to the Royal Mile and up to the castle. We just went in the free bits and the shop and then it was time for tea in The Elephant House, where J K Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books. Very good tea (leaves that sink so that, although they give you a tea strainer, you don't really need it) and very good shortbread.

from the castle

I 'engaged' with these two on the train in the morning.
They were going to the 3rd birthday party of Red Face's nephew.
Red Face had a frog hood to put on when the make-up dried.

Clearing monster fuchsia around a young hazel

In the north corner of the Boggy Brae garden there is a young hazel tree. It's surrounded by monster fuchsias that are hell bent on taking over the world. I decided the other day to give the hazel some space. If you click on the pic to enlarge it, you'll see a yellow leaf in the low centre and to the left of that a small patch of sunlight. That sunlight is on one of the hazel trunks; it has two.

Boggy Brae hazel may well have grown from a seed from this old hazel up the hill (see below) in the woods the trunks of which are horizontal.

photo from February 2015

There was a fair amount of dead wood that I could reach over the wall and the old fence wires before I needed to climb over the wall with my alligator saw, so I took the fire basket down with me.  When I did get round to climbing over the wall I grabbed one of the wire holder thingies to haul myself up. It came out in my hand! I think it was the only one whose anchorage was iffy.

Came out in my hand

So then I had a tangle of boingy fence wires to deal with whose ends I couldn't untangle. Out came the hacksaw. That pipe that the hacksaw is leaning on is our heating oil supply pipe which Toad has begun to repaint at the top end. Clearing vegetation from around the oil pipe so he can get at it was another reason to clear fuchsia from near the hazel.

After a couple of hours clearing monster fuchsia the young hazel had a bit more space to breathe and, with any luck, to produce filberts in due course. It has grown quite tall and there is more clearing to do down there but it was a good morning's work. The three and four metre long fuchsia branches I cut have been piled up by the lane to dry a bit. The lower ones will probably put down roots if I leave them too long.

Looking up under hazel

In front of the wall, along the lane, is a rough verge of Opposite-leaved Golden Saxifrage mixed with Wood Sorrel, Herb Bennet and a few other things. I found some of the saxifrage actually growing out of the wall, Wood Sorrel growing on top of it with ivy, and a tiny spruce tree also growing out of the wall. That got yanked out and chucked on the fire.

At the bottom of the wall was this small plant. I'm not sure what it is yet. Behind it, having grown through the wall is a fuchsia root. As has happened often when I'm regarding or dealing with rampant plant growth on the  Boggy Brae, I feel a sense of reassurance that Nature, given half a chance, is a good deal tougher than we think.

Lovely purple light this morning behind the Sentinel Tree

The 'Sentinel Tree' showed up well against a pale purple sky this morning. I'm enjoying the fact that the bare part of its trunk that was shielded from light until ten years ago when much of the hillside above us was 'cropped' of its plantation trees now seems to be putting out green shoots. It will be interesting to see how far it can clothe itself before the next crop catches up.

The dead wood in the foreground of the picture at the right is holly. Keep meaning to get a ladder up there and harvest it for firewood. Small bits fall off now and then.

Go, Sentinel!

Nearer the house, as the sun came further south, its light caught some of our neighbour's remaining cherry tree leaves.

I made it right up to the Sentinel Tree last November. It was tricky because there are so many fallen and felled trunks lying about and a thick growth of bracken, bramble and opportunistic young birch, not to mention a fast-flowing steep burn (stream) to cross. I was standing on one of the more or less horizontal trunks to take this pic that's looking down to the back of our house and the misty sea loch beyond.










The next two pics were taken last October when I was lower in the wood and wondering how tricky getting up to Sentinel would be! Anyway, I have touched it; actual hugging was difficult given my precarious footing!

undergrowth to fight through
to reach Sentinel

The pale green in the middle is our back garden,
as is the upright goat willow tree in the NW corner.

Good old Rattletrap

Every year at MOT time the mechanic sucks air in through his teeth, full of doubt and misgivings, and then Rattletrap sails through the tests.

The photo, taken last Saturday evening, is deceptive. In the low light you don't see the oldness and shabbiness so well.

Good old Rattletrap.

And below a morning sky, also from Saturday.

Planting tulips

Potted up some tulip bulbs this morning. Freebies that I got from Thompson & Morgan along with some seeds. The last time I planted tulips it was directly into the ground and they did well until the roe deer found them. So this lot are getting some protection in their pots on what is euphemistically known as the sun terrace at the south-east side of the house.

Pieces of old yogurt pot are being used as labels. There are ten of each of "Queen of the Night", "Flaming Flag", "Fontainbleu", and "Menton". The bits of shell and stone from near the Irrepressible Rose are at the bottom of one of the pots.

Looking up from my potting by the shed, this was my view of Monster Cypress corner (where I've been having the most recent bonfires) and above it in the wood beyond.

Then it was time for some tea and a jam and cheese 'piece' on the heel of the loaf.

The Rhododendron luteum is having a slight autumn flowering.

There are very few montbretia flowers this year because the deer seem to have discovered their deliciousness as snacks. They eat the leaves too.

Miss Cutey Deer and the Irrepressible Rose

Okay, Miss Cutey Doe, Miss ButterWouldn'tMelt, this means war!

She has been making herself so comfortably at home that she even reached round onto the porch to eat the single porch rose that bloomed despite earlier deer depradations on the plant!

My guiding of the shoots as they recovered behind the porch trellis clearly wasn't enough to keep deer off these tasty morsels.

yesterday

and, below, today:

I've been meaning to do a proper tidy up there. I've forgotten why the shells and wee stones are there. From now on Irrepressible Rose is getting industrial strength protection.

Growl. Snarl.

Well, a sigh anyway.

Letting the light in

My view to the north from up in the top south corner, sipping tea before I started my bonfire a couple of days ago. I'm making the most of a spell of dry weather. Stuff in the house has to wait at times like this. Dry weather spells here remind me of having a baby in the house. Other than keeping the kitchen and bathroom hygienic and  feeding everybody, housework becomes even less important than usual while you drop everything and attend to baby needs. Tending to the Boggy Brae garden works a bit like that too.

Same principle as making hay while the sun shines, I guess.

It used to be very dark under the big cypress up there and if you weren't a chicken, it was difficult to get into the space underneath its low branches. When two of its several trunks began to keel over a couple of years ago some light got into the dark spaces. I decided to let in some more. Some of the low branches have been sending roots down. I don't really want any more of these trees so I'm cutting back the smaller low branches, burning the dead (and some not dead) foliage, and making a wood pile. Any excuse for a bonfire? Well, maybe ;)

Dead bracken stalks make good fire starters.

After I'd put away tools yesterday, tramping up and down between the shed, the house and up top, I spotted this drowsy deer just a few yards from the back door. I think she might be quite a young one. She seemed unconcerned by my presence.