Loch Leven

We drove up to Loch Leven this morning to test out the path which runs around it from Kinross to Vane farm on the other side. It has been upgraded in recent years to accommodate walkers, cyclists and wheel chairs and while we constituted the walkers today, we will go back with the bikes, and accomplish the whole path instead of the part we had time for this morning.

It was warm in the sun and with no wind, the loch was calm and unruffled.
The sunlight slanted on the infamous castle on an island in the loch, where once Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned on the orders of her cousin Queen Elizabeth I of England.
It looked so lovely in the sun today with the green lawn in front stretching down to the water, that it might not have been too much of a hardship to linger there and had she but known it, a whole lot better than her final imprisonment in Fotheringay Castle, Northamptonshire. ( I have made a correction thanks to Tryards. I though it was Yorkshire)

There were a few people about with dogs, but most of the time we had the world to ourselves, the silence only broken by birdsong and further along the path by the whine of a chainsaw somewhere in the woods to our left.

It was hot enough on the walk back for gloves and anoraks to be carried and for the chance to sit outside the Boathouse Bistro at the end of the loch, in the sun, for a cup of tea and a round of sandwiches.

If we had weather like this more often we wouldn't need to clog airports and southern motorways to escape abroad to places more crowded and less beautiful.

This view is looking east across the loch to the hamlet of Scotlandwell.