Edinburgh: Calton Hill

Better in large ("L").

This is the view from Carlton's Hill in Edinburgh: the castle is visible, and the monument in the foreground, and lots of other things too! It was wonderful.

I've had another excellent day in Edinburgh! Where to start...? Well, we (Lady M. and I) walked up Carlton's Hill first thing (ish), and then visited the See Us exhibition (although we could only see half of it because of a meeting going on in one of the rooms...). Next was a visit to Lady M.'s club (!), and then (most importantly) we went to see what was going on at Blackford Pond where we saw coots (bullying...), mallards (bickering), tufted ducks (chirruping!), swans (nesting!), and jackdaws (grey necks glistening). There was also a pair of little grebes which were adorable, and some very friendly robins. I've put a close-up picture of a cute female mallard on my Blipfolio here: I offered her and the huge cob swan "fake bread" (where I just hold out my fingers without bread, and they often approach to investigate), and she kept coming over and even bit me 3 times. The cob swan was too wary, so approached but didn't go in to take the fake bread.

I visited family members in the afternoon; it was lovely to catch up and hear who had been up to what, and was even treated to a slideshow of some of my great uncle's bird photography from Scotland, the Falklands, Alaska, and even further afield. He used to use a 500mm mirror lens handheld successfully!

p.s. The map feature on Blip tells me that the monument in the foreground is the Carlton Stewart monument, which is actually obvious from the inscription visible the photo...