Two out of three ain't bad

It's Sunday today so a very lazy morning was had, looking at BikerBabe's and my map from holiday, and thinking about all the places we didn't think to go at the time.  After lunch I needed to go to the shops for milk, so contrived a very roundabout route and went hunting for some milestones whose locations I'd tentatively or more positively identified.

The first one seemed to have been removed, or lost, only in the last couple of years, thanks to ever-expanding Heras fencing and housebuilding near Gilmerton.  It would have said four miles to Edinburgh.  However, I rode further and quickly spotted the second one, which is the left-hand photo here.  It's of the same style as the two I visited, near Straiton and south of Penicuik, although those are on the road from Biggar and this one is on the other side of the Gilmerton housebuilding, on the road from Newbattle, which is now the A72.

A little bit harder to find was the third milestone, which is quite interesting.  You could drive past and never notice it.  On the OS map of about 1900 it's marked as disused, because it's a Post Horse milestone.  The carved text is terribly eroded after exactly 200 years, but you can make out a big '5' at the top, and part of 'Edinburgh' just above the horizontal line.  The full text would have read:

5 MILES From the General Post Office EDINBURGH | Erected to regulate the Post Horse duties Payable by Hackney Coach 1824.

They were all erected at the five mile point, and there are three others that I know of in south Edinburgh, but I'm yet to photograph them despite passing by hundreds of times over the years.

All milestoned out I dropped down to Lasswade and came back through the woods for the sheer mud of it all, and then did the shopping before heading home.  There is some new artwork in the Graffiti Tunnel that I must come back to photograph – it's amazingly good.