Country in the city- yes it is possible!

Here it is, my top 5 walks and cycles about Edinburgh over the past year:

1. Leith – Edinburgh Botanic Gardens

You can walk this in just under an hour, from the end of North Junction St. out along Ferry Rd, turning off at Inverleith or Arboretum Avenue. Ferry Road is busy, but Inverleith is calmer and the Botanics themselves are a joy! I have never walked there without it lifting my spirits, even in the middle of Winter. Extend the walk out the John Hope Gate and into town via Dean Village and Stockbridge. If you’re passing through on a Sunday morning check out the Stockbridge farmer’s market.

2. Arthur’s Seat and Duddingston Loch Nature Reserve

From Leith you can walk to Holyrood Park in an hour at a brisk pace. Arthur’s seat is a wonderful (if sometimes crowded) place to take a breather and gain some perspective. Coming off the hill follow Queen’s Drive and connect with Duddingston Low Rd, or the signposted path to Duddingston Loch- this little oasis of calm in the heart of the city is a bird sanctuary.

3. Leith to Cramond cycle

This is about 6 miles each way. I did this via Ferry Road to Davidson’s Mains, but there is a cycle path that takes you along the coast via Granton. Cramond is a charming and affluent village (now more of a suburb) at the mouth of the River Almond where it enters the Firth of Forth. Archaeological evidence suggests it is one of Britain’s earliest settlements and the remains of a Roman fort can be seen in the parkland. Cramond Island is a tidal islet which can be reached on foot via a causeway at low tide. It gets a mention in Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn.

3. Leith to Musselburgh cycle via Portobello

Again, about 6 miles either way but a very pleasant coastal cycle- out of Leith via Seafield, Portobello and Joppa. You can avoid the A1 and most of Portobello High Street by following the promenade, but look out for joggers and dogs.

4. Balerno reservoirs

Take a 44 bus from Princes St to Balerno (about 40 minutes) and walk up through the village- follow signs for Pentlands Regional Park. You can take any number of routes up into the Pentlands from here, but the three reservoirs and the Red Moss can be done in a couple of hours. Take food or pick some up in the local co-op, there is only one pub serving food in Balerno (The Grey Horse) and the kitchen was closed on the day I was there.

5. Water of Leith walk

I’ve only walked a section of this,  from the city centre to Leith, in parts the path is difficult to find and not fully developed (and I can imagine a little bit dodgy if you’re on your own) but stretches of it are very beautiful, particularly about Stockbridge. The entire route is 12 miles long and runs from the back of Balerno High School so I will be revisiting.

Touchstones…

This morning I walked out on St. Andrews pier with friends, into a swirl of sleet sweeping noiselessly in off the North Sea. The cold on my face slowing speech, slurring my exclamations at the marvelous immediacy of history and the delight of a place newly visited. We shared the memory of our first meeting and sharing a sodden bivvy bag on the Cairngorm Plateau back in 2007, huddling together for warmth while our instructor doled out hot tea. There on the mountain- friendship! One of two forged that weekend. Touchstones on each other’s personal journeys. How wonderful, how remarkable, when paths converge and a part of your journey is shared.

 

 

 

It has been Winter for so, so long. The promise of Spring glimmers in the wake of a January sleet fall. I am glad to my heart’s core for it.

Spring Dawn

I observed the dawn this morning. Nothing really significant about this, I see many dawns as I’m partial to a bit of outdoor exercise before I go to work, but today is the first of Spring. It was about -3 and a hard frost had made everything sparkly, but for me Spring had officially sprung. Tiny narcissi were peeking their soft yellow heads up out of my flowerbeds, a joy to see after a miserable Winter. The first of February is also St. Brigid’s Day, Là Fèile Brìde, celebrated by Christian and pagan alike as Brigid the saint is often confused with Brigid the goddess. I don’t profess to be either one but I like the symbolism. In Celtic mythology Brigid was of the Tuatha De Danaan, the godlike race of pre-Christian Ireland. She was the goddess of fertility, poetry, smithcraft, the hearth and the home. On her feast day fires were lit on hill tops to call upon her favour and bring warmth to the land. Saint Brigid was a fifth century mystic and healer, founder of monastic settlements principally in County Kildare.

So this morning I ran to welcome Brigid. I watched the sun rising over the Kylerhea hills as the stars faded into the brightening blue.

Upstream, downstream

Winter is over on Skye. I open the front door and am not flayed alive by the wind, nor drenched in the miasmic drizzle that soaks into your bones. That light in the sky is really the sun and oh how I’ve missed it. The months of 7am running in the damp darkness, gruelling rides into wind and hail endured to maintain core fitness will now pay off. It’s time to take to the water.

We’ve not been out in the canoe since about October and I’m anxious that I’ve unleanred my paddle skills, but muscle memory is a remarkable thing. You never forget how to ride a bike, or to swim. It appears that you don’t forget how to paddle either. As we push out on Loch na Sguabaidh the strokes come comfortably and naturally. That said, it will take a few outings before I am confident to take on the sea lochs or  an expedition like the Great Glen.

The strath is peaceful today, a couple of tents by the bridge suggest walkers about, other than that we are alone but for a pair of mallards and some busy reed buntings.

We cross the loch to the river which links it to a smaller upper loch as this is somewhat sheltered from the wind which funnels down the glen and a good spot to practice our manoeuvres. Today we are working on turning the canoe with duffek and cross duffek strokes. There are several ways of turning a canoe, the most basic being sweeping strokes of the paddle in an arc from the bow or stern. To ‘plant a duffek’ is for the bow paddler to plunge the paddle blade into the water at either a 10 (onside) or 2 (across body) o’clock angle. This creates an axis about which the canoe can turn efficiently and quickly, as the bow paddler drives it forward. This snaking river is an ideal place to practice this move safely as it is relatively free of rapids or other obstacles.

About three hours on the river and I think I’ve mastered the duffek technique. The wind has picked up so it will take our last reserves of energy to push back down the length of Loch na Sguabaidh to where we left our car. One thing I had forgotten is how much of a full body workout three hours of canoeing is, apart from the obvious work you do with your arms and shoulders, the strength comes from your core, your balance from your legs. By the time we get home and unload the gear we’re both completely knackered. It has been indescribably good to be ‘back in the paddle’.

Connemara dreamin’

Did you ever linger in the last pages of a book because you just didn’t want to let it go? I’ve been reading the final installment of Tim Robinson’s Connemara trilogy, Little Gaelic Kingdom. For weeks I have shrugged off geography and time and returned to the wild place that I have loved for so long I can smell the air at the mention of it. In Robinson’s words and thoughts I am fourteen years old with the surf crashing over my feet at Roisin na Manach. I am skipping bog pools on the trail up to the Mass rock overlooking Kilkieran. I am chanting verses of Peigin Litir Mor in the ramshackle coach that ferries city kids to and from Irish college each Summer. The landscape and language of Connemara moved me with seismic force at that formative time.

Tim Robinson is one of my literary and environmental heroes. I recall a later time when I was teaching a field school in the West and rambling about Roundstone in the hope that I might stumble across him and impress my students, but perhaps he knew that and kept a canny distance. A writer with sufficient wisdom to balance nostalgia with realism, empathy with empiricism and the mental dexterity to explain the Connemara coast with fractal mathematics.

It would be easy, lazy even, to look back twenty years to that Summer in Irish college and romanticise Connemara, but I’ve lived enough in a remote rural place to know better.

In the twenty years of meticulously mapping, researching, gathering and compiling Robinson doesn’t romanticise either, and this is something I admire. Alongside the quaint eccentricities and wry humour he accounts for centuries of social and economic deprivation, oppression and the sheer brutal struggle to survive in an environment as hostile as it is beautiful.

There are so many parts of Scotland that this writing could be about. Many times while out on the Morar coast or the more westerly islands, Tiree in particular, I’ve felt a sense of Connemara, that Atlantic light with the darkness gathering behind. A vision symbolic of its predicament; the light and the dark. I leave Connemara as if it were a physical leaving. I wonder when I’ll be back there again. In such times as these, I wonder how I will find it.

Related articles

• Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom, By Tim Robinson (independent.co.uk)

2012: Beyond the bridge

I’m just in after my first cycle of  2012, in the rain that hasn’t stopped since Hogmanay and not showing signs of stopping any time soon. In spite of the soaking and dripping gear hung everywhere available in the house, it feels good to be physically active again.

If anything, the ride out this morning got me thinking about where I’d like to go in 2012. This time last year Brian and I were in training for our Arran cycle. Having this as a goal pushed us out every weekend in spite of the weather, gradually building up our distance and pace and in doing so, dispelling the January blues.

So what’s on the hit list for 2012? For ages I’ve been fascinated by a loch in Stirlingshire called Lubnaig, ‘bendy’ in Gaelic- and it is, almost at a 90 degree angle. I don’t know this part of the world beyond driving the A84 thinking I’d love to stop and have a sprachle about if I had the time. One of my most memorable A84 drives was coming up this way two winters ago, seeing the  ghostly light of advection fog off the loch seeping into the dark density of forest, feeling like I had strayed into the opening scene of a gothic novel. I want to canoe Loch Lubnaig.

Brian tells me that Ben Ledi, the adjacent munro, is a cracker.  Twinge of guilt that I’ve neglected the hills in the last year. Admittedly I’ve lost the nerve for ‘real’  mountaineering, but this year I want to climb Ben Ledi. Mountains of Scotland, I still love you!

I want to properly explore the Campsies. I want to cycle to Fintry from Kirkintilloch, and across to Drymen…and wherever that road leads.

My love of the Argyll coast will lead me back there, (on two wheels as much as possible). With the Oban to Ballachulish cycle path more or less complete now, it’s time for a re-assessment.

Closer to the Island, Brian’s grand plan is to canoe the Great Glen. This time last year it’s not something I would have considered, but one of my achievements in 2011 that I’m really proud of is learning to canoe. I’ve got a lot of work to do to build my upper body strength to endure a long paddle like Loch Ness, but where there’s a will and the promise of adventure, there’s a way.

There’s no doubt 2012 will take many an unexpected turn but these are our dreams. Like kites they’ll change direction with the wind, but for now we’ll send them into the sky and hold on tight.

A fairy path

Four years ago I remember walking back from the Ardvasar bar with folk I had befriended at the Gaelic College, by torchlight and moon-glow. One of them turned to me and said ‘We are all on a fairy path’. For some reason, either the effect of the alcohol or the welcome camaraderie of new friends after many weeks of gadding about, I held this thought and think, over the years, that I have come to understand what she meant.

A fairy path. I was certainly on one this morning. Brian and I had been watching the clouds darkening in anticipation of Hurricane Katya’s angry tail end but decided to walk anyway. We drove out Kintail, skirting Loch Duich. The rain falling so heavily the black fastness of the Five Sisters had dissolved into a silvery veil of something hardly substantial. We turned left as if to go to Shiel Bridge but branched off in the direction of Ratagan, bound for Letterfearn. We followed this ribbon of road along the loch-side for about five miles and from Letterfearn set out on foot for Caisteal Gruagaig. At Totaig the road became track, muddy in the rain but easy to walk through a dripping tangle of native woodland, ferns, sessile oak, velvety mosses, brambles, wild alliums poking spiky purple heads through the undergrowth. A fairy wood if ever there was one. Dissecting the path small burns hurtled downwards through steep gullies and out  on to the shore below.

A turn in the path revealed a larger cataract, its water pooling on the track about rocks and roots under the still green canopy of oak leaves. Caisteal Gruagaig concealed just beyond. The caisteal is actually an Iron Age broch, one of three in close proximity on the Glenelg Peninsula (Gruagaig being the smaller of the three). We found it surprisingly well-preserved and made a slippy ascent up to the entrance, under an intriguing triangular-shaped lintel stone. The presences I felt…does the earth remember the feeling of lightning? Does something of its current remain? I felt this, as if something long, long past had flickered alive again momentarily but significantly…

There are stories about the Gruagaig, I found one on the Walk Highlands website that suggests she was a witch who gave birth the two giants who built the brochs at Glenelg. Gruagaig is common enough in Gaelic place-names. In Gregorson Campbell’s The Gaelic Otherworld I read that she is a domestic sprite who haunts brochs and dùns in coastal parts, sometimes known as the Green Lady. I’m keen on Gruagaigs at the moment, there is Dùn Gruagaig near Elgol on Skye which I still need to explore.

I’ve been in places in the wilder parts of Scotland and Ireland where the interplay of myth and geography leads your eyes to see something other than physical, to read stories in the landscape, to feel presences. Although I might make light of the superstitious beliefs of my forbears there is usually a shred of truth in the old tales, or a way of making sense of the world…I keep an open mind on these things but I’m not too concerned with truths, more with learning that the human relationship with place is layered, complex and mediated by imagination. I’m on a fairy path.

 

Film-making

I recently took a notion to enter a short film competition. Since I’ve not got the kind of creative brain for fiction or drama I went with my gut and decided to make a 5 minute film about what most inspired me, the landscape about where I live on Skye. I’m lucky enough to live in Broadford, which is within easy reach of  some of the most spectacular mountain, moorland and coastal scenery in Scotland, an extensive part of which is managed by the John Muir Trust.

Armed with camera and tripod we set off for our first location, the slopes of Beinn na Crò, which rises up on the southern side of Loch na Sguabaidh, just beyond the village of Torrin.

Standing alone ajacent to the sweeping horse-shoe shaped range of Beinn na Caillich, Beinn Dearg Mòr and Beinn Dearg Beag, Beinn na Crò is a less travelled hill. In its own right, reaching 565 m, it is a fine example of Skye’s shapely granite hills. The ascent is wet , boggy and tussocky. We aimed off the waterlogged trail which skirts Loch na Sguabaidh to follow the line of a fence upwards. Carrying heavy filming equipment up a steep and soggy hill is not the easiest of tasks and makes me appreciate the challenges of filming outdoors. In spite of this, the gradient of the mountain means you gain height quickly, and managing the sodden terrain rewards a walker with really breath-taking views of Blaven, Sgurr nan Each, Belig and Gars-bheinn.

Although I’m familiar with this part of Skye, there was something about lugging a film camera up Beinn na Crò that made me see everything differently. Cloud patterns on the mountainside, the silvery sweep of a rain shower in from the sea, a lone swan gliding over the surface of the loch far below…the familiar made extraordinary.

After we had taken as much footage as we needed we picked our way down again. Editing this will keep me busy over the Winter months.

Gut feeling

What is this? What is this current in the water that puts me off course when I am least expecting? It comes in a word, an image or a memory and sets me longing for a place, not where I come from but where I have felt a connection that I can’t articulate.

I’ve felt this across thousands of miles. Many years ago, on a remote island off the coast of Malaysia I set my mind on a journey to Inis Mor. The furthest West place off the Irish coast, a brutal place. An obstacle of rock protruding angrily out of the Atlantic. The bare bones of the end of the world.  I made the trip not long after, in an October storm. I walked across the island before sunrise and greeted the Atlantic, soaked and rigid with the cold. Something about that walk felt wonderful.

There are other places that draw me in like this. I’ve felt like this walking the Western coast of Islay, in the woods of Ormaig, hunched by the stones of Callanish. My inner compass seems to pull me Westwards. I remember a Summer, I was fourteen and at Irish Summer school in Connemara. I’d wandered off from my group along the beach at Ruisin na Manach, walking to dry off from the sea, I went astray. Something rooted in a deep part of me that day that has never left me. There is a saying as Gaeilge (which my language addled brain cannot remember) which translates as ‘your feet will lead you to where your heart is.’

I’m walking the long way.

Not before time

Nature is worth billions to the UK economy, that was the declaration that greeted my ears while I made my coffee this morning.  Is amused and puzzled me how anybody could quantify something like that so I listened in to find out about how, and later found the story on the BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13616543

I think it is impossible to put a sum on the value of our natural environment. How could it ever be enough?  Ian Bateman’s comment says it all, “Without the environment, we’re all dead – so the total value is infinite.”

Most people I know make a conscious effort to ‘do their bit’ for nature. Can we do a little more? Admittedly my conscience is taking a lurch writing this, because I love my comforts and little luxuries as much as anyone and no matter how much I love cycling, won’t be giving up my car any time soon…but the question remains and I’m pretty sure the answer is yes, we can.