On Saturday, o joy of joys, we had the first expedition since February 2020 with our walking group friends. We met at the Roman Bridge in Musselburgh, just outside Edinburgh to the east. It's not really Roman, but the Romans did build a bridge on this site in about 100 AD. They then packed up and went home after a few centuries, and the bridge was getting a bit decrepit around 1300 so was rebuilt. This version dates only from 1597.
We walked through the village of Inveresk, stopping at St Michael's Church, where we met a girl with a bunny on a lead (not a common sight) and looked at some gravestones. This one has iron bars across it, presumably to guard against grave-robbers, who were still around in - or at least shortly before - 1836, when this person died. Burke and Hare, infamous in Edinburgh for murdering 16 people when they couldn't find enough graves to rob in order to supply bodies for medical dissection, were doing this in 1828.
And then we just walked on, chatting a lot. We were in two groups, about 10 minutes apart, to be a bit more Covid aware.
Poppies.
And who could help admiring this hedge, cut into an engine and an elephant to the right of the gate
and a pig, a teddy and a dog on the left?
We only walked about five miles and it was all very ordinary but after the year and a bit we've all had, it was also WONDERFUL.
