Two walks

I thought I'd show my walk yesterday from the bus stop to the dentist - for anyone who doesn't know Edinburgh. This is the New Town (begun 1780, so not exactly brand new), built in a neo-Classical style.

 As you can see, it was a lovely day - though somewhat chilly.

Ah, it's the start of the foreign-student-on-educational-trip-abroad season.  Lots of Italian giggling from this lot.

There are lots of little gardens - and some not so little - in the New Town.

This is my dentist's street.

And here's where he operates - bathed in angelic light. He has only the ground floor. Originally his premises and the storeys above and below would have been one house - the basement kitchen and so on and the attic bedrooms for the servants and the rest for the family. Nowadays, the whole house would cost one and a half million pounds at least.

There's cherry blossom everywhere. So pretty, if transient ... like life - no, let's not start thinking about death again.

Today Mr L and I decided to get the train to Falkirk and walk from there to the Kelpies. We'd been going to do it yesterday but the forecast said there was 80% chance of precipitation in Edinburgh (though in fact we had bright sunshine all day) so we postponed it to today (50% chance). Well, it wasn't precipitating much at first as we walked along the canal.

This is a swan on its nest. As you can see, it's using all of itself to keep its eggs warm - wisely - there was a cold wind.

Gorse. Looking at it, I was thinking about Meg, who said that gorse was a pest in Australia. It's sometimes controlled here by setting fire to it. But I don't suppose that this would be a good idea in Australia, where the earth isn't dampened so often by the gentle rain from heaven.

We got to the Falkirk Wheel (amazing feat of engineering - sort of giant lock) and decided to have an early lunch.

Then it began to hail - really quite hard - and the sky turned to a uniform dark grey as the hail became rain.

After consideration, we got a bus back to Falkirk - at which point the sun came out. We'll do the rest of the walk another day.