Two pin pricks

The two pin pricks of light on the hills belong to the two cyclists that Mr A captured popping their mountain bikes over the fence at the bottom of Black Hill. We first spotted them as we came down to Black Springs, and they made pretty good progress down the hill. They passed us soon after, looking pretty muddy, and said they’d had a lot of fun on the hill.

The two white shapes in the loch are two swans that seemed to spend most of their time with their bottoms up and heads down as we approached them.

We did the extended Harlaw potter, starting off in the gloom of the early light around 8am, and finishing at 9am when there might have been some good reflections in Harlaw had there been any sort of sunrise. Sadly, though, all was grey. It was very good to be out even so, and I enjoyed the walk immensely and hope we will be back again soon. It’s six months since we were up there, more or less. Just for the record the Harlaw car park, which admittedly is not large, was completely full when we left at 9.15am, with cars backing up along the verge of the access road back to the public road. This is on a grey Sunday morning in January. I saw a post later on Facebook saying that all of the Pentland Hills car parks were full…. This was not so before the pandemic. It has seen a sea change in people getting out there, and it would seem that the facilities are just not sufficient.

We came back via the supermarket, and then spent the rest of the day pretty quietly. I’ve done some work - a bit of email wrangling, finishing off my comments on the PhD I examined the other day and approving the joint report, and a bit of teaching preparation. I feel more or less ready for the coming week. Now I’m making headway with the Book Group book O Caledonia, although I don’t think I will get it finished before tomorrow evening.