Balerno to Slateford

We went up to see Son and family the other day. Here are the children feeding deer at a deer centre. 

I'm sure the deer are perfectly well fed, but they were all very keen to eat the pellets, cunningly sold to us by the centre. 

It was a lovely day. 

Today we did the recce for a walk we're leading with the walking chums in November. It was a perfect autumn day. 

We walked along the river path from Balerno to Slateford. It's all in the city, but feels like the country. 

It's mostly along a former railway line. Here, a tunnel has been painted inside, much of it illustrating the poem "From a Railway Carriage" by Robert Louis Stevenson, who often visited Colinton (on the route of our walk) because his grandfather was the minister there. It's a poem that, in my youth anyway, was much anthologised for children, and we learnt it off by heart. 

From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson Next

Faster than fairies, faster than witches, Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches; And charging along like troops in a battle All through the meadows the horses and cattle: All of the sights of the hill and the plain Fly as thick as driving rain; And ever again, in the wink of an eye, Painted stations whistle by. Here is a child who clambers and scrambles, All by himself and gathering brambles; Here is a tramp who stands and gazes; And here is the green for stringing the daisies! Here is a cart runaway in the road Lumping along with man and load; And here is a mill, and there is a river: Each a glimpse and gone forever!

It's a good poem, full of rhythmic energy, and the painting was splendid.

Here's RLS himself in the tunnel. 

And here's the rather pretty church. 

The path was mainly very easy and the weather beautiful. This is through the window of a grotto along the way. 

Still, by the end of the 6+ miles we were quite tired, and glad to reach the Water of Leith Visitors' Centre for a sit-down and a cup of tea. We're 77 and 75, after all. It was a wonderful day, though. 

 

Richmond again

We've been away for a long weekend with our walking friends to Richmond, in Yorkshire. We were there last year and had a good time so decided to return to the same house. 

We walked both on the Saturday and on the Sunday. Richmond is quite hilly, as is the surrounding countryside. 

It's also wooded. This was a lovely walk - five or six miles, not too strenuous. 

On the second day we walked down through the town to the river.

We admired Richmond Castle as we did so. The building of it was started in about 1070, and we thought we might visit it on the way back. 

This walk was harder: there were about fifteen stiles of various levels of difficulty and wobbliness, a slanting, tree-rooty, muddy path above a steep fall down to the river, lots of steps, miles of muddy and stony paths which were quite hard to walk on. It took us much longer than we expected. 

And by the time we stopped for lunch, we really needed to sit down! 

Still, it was fun, especially in retrospect.

We didn't visit the castle, though. We went back to the house and lay on the bed. One of us (not me) had quite a big nap. 

 

Being a lady

I seem to be rather busy - though I have to confess that some of this busyness consists of coffees and lunches with friends. But then there are the two choirs and the church magazine and the family and the garden and walking and general faffing about. How do other people, eg Lynley of Lynley Quilts, manage to make a quilt a week, when I'm still plodding on with the rainbow quilt I started in April or so?

Anyway, there isn't much reportable, other than the garden, which is still colourful, such as with the lilies (above) that I bought at the Chelsea Flower Show. 

And these cosmos and sedum,

and Japanese anemones - pestilential but pretty - 

and these autumn crocuses - though I'm denying that it's autumn - 

and nicotiana

and fuchsia

and various things in pots

and verbena bonariensis, which I love, though it sets seeds willy-nilly

and more cosmos. 

I was up town the other day and things were beginning to look a bit autumnal.

I was up town again today. Not a bad view as I waited for the bus home. 

But this was exciting: Anna of Thimbleanna was in Edinburgh with her aunt last week, and she kindly invited me to go to a Scottish baking afternoon at a cookery school. I thought it might be quite tiring, but it wasn't at all. We sat at a kitchen island and were brought everything we needed, already weighed out. All we had to do was a little ladylike mixing and then put the results in baking trays or cake tins, which had been pre-lined by someone else. And whenever bowls or spoons were used, they were whisked away and replaced by clean ones. We weren't allowed to put things in the ovens ourselves (health and safety) so someone else did that, and then took them out in due course, and it was all carefully timed so that everything was cool at the same time. Then we were given a plate and told to take whatever we wanted from our own goodies - cranachan cake (raspberry with oatmeal), meringues with cream and strawberries, cheese scones and shortbread - and go through to a dining room, where we were plied with tea, coffee and prosecco and sat eating and having a nice chat. 

I could easily get used to something like that!

And it was lovely to chat to Anna and to meet her aunt, who is 89 and looks about 65. She has 7 children, 27 grandchildren, 35 great-grandchildren (with more expected) and a great-great-grandchild. Wow!

Stitches

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This was a plastic shopping bag for sale at the supermarket, and I took a photo of it because I thought - quilt pattern! Maybe I think too much about quilts? I would not make it in orange, however. 

We took a little train trip down to the Borders last week to have another look at the Great Tapestry of Scotland. 

We've seen it before, but there's always something new to look at. It's in Galashiels and this (above) is Gala Water. 

There are 160 panels in the Tapestry and it's the longest such thing in Europe.  The last time we went, we only looked at the first half before we ran out of brain, so this time we started half-way through. 

I could so easily get into embroidery; and it would be much more portable than a quilt. (However, I don't need another hobby to add to my two choirs, my editorship of the church magazine, my quilting, gardening and walking.) The Tapestry (only it isn't; it's embroidery) is about the history of Scotland. Here's a chap walking behind a newly modified kind of plough. 

Here's a panel about the East India Company, and Scotland's (doubtless scurrilous) involvement. 

A jolly lion. 

A lady curling - a Scottish sport on the ice. I do like all the different stitches used. 

There's a whole panel, Margaret G-F, about your famous relative, the poet Hugh McDiarmid. It's not a wonderful likeness but they've got the hair! (The panel's not dirty - those are just shadows.)

I can't remember what this depicted, but again, the stitching is great. 

1000 stitchers from all over Scotland took part in this - mainly, but not exclusively, women. They're all named beside their panels, and we recognised the names of a few people whom we vaguely know. Scotland's a small place. 
 

Flowers and such like

The house I grew up in had two greenhouses, in one of which was a large, twining hoya carnosa.  When I got married (52+ years ago) and left home, I took a cutting, and this is it, still blooming away. The flowers are waxy and scented, and drip sticky nectar, so you couldn't have it sitting on your best furniture, but it's pretty and it reminds me of home, and my dad. I think I've only repotted it once, which I imagine is why the plant remains conveniently small.

We went on a walk with the walking chums on Saturday in East Lothian, and saw, among other things, Saltcoats Castle, which I'd never heard of. It was apparently built around 1590, but has been left to dereliction and is mainly unvisited. Scotland has lots of castles and not all can be carefully preserved. There was an ancient pear tree growing beside it.

A couple of us tried one of the pears, but it was like biting into soft wood - pretty dry and tasteless. Our horticultural expert said that the tree could be hundreds of years old, and our newer varieties have been bred to be soft and juicy. I suppose that, in the middle of winter hundreds of years ago, with food scarce, you might be happy to stew these pears and eat them. 

It's very good farming land round here. 

6 miles - we had a good time in perfect walking weather. 

On Sunday we went up to visit Son and family. We went to Dundee Botanic Gardens, and Medium Granddaughter, now more or less recovered from her ruptured appendix, enjoyed playing with the sensitive plant. 

It's lovely to see them. I wish they lived nearer, though. I hate motorways and am always very frightened on them. 

Our garden is mainly over, but the annuals still put on a good show. 

Yesterday was Daughter 1's birthday and she had the day off, so we met at the art gallery for coffee

and then went to the Andy Goldsworthy exhibition. He's an artist who creates art with natural objects, mainly outside. Here, he'd done some stuff inside, such as this corridor between cut branches

and this pattern made by removing one side of bracken fronds and arranging them in a serpentine shape. 

This was inspired by the Rockefeller Center, which has flags from each of the US states flying outside it. Goldsworthy got the reddest earth he could from each state and used them to dye fabric, hoping to signify that borders can be transcended. This would be nice!

But we all liked his outside work best. And there were lots of photos of it: ephemeral art works he's created over the years. Here, he's arranged yellow and black leaves in and around tree trunks. 

 

These are foxglove flowers cupped into one another. 

It was an interesting exhibition. He has a lot of patience!