Favorite Fotos: Happy Trails

I did a lot of walking during my time in the Old World, but most of it was on city streets, not hiking trails. However, there was some of the latter activity, mostly in Wales and Scotland, and I thought I'd share some of my "unpublished" photos from these pleasing walks.

The picture at the left was taken from near the top of Arthur's Seat, just outside of Edinburgh, the lovely city laid out before you here. The body of water in the distance is, if I'm not mistaken, the Firth of Forth, which I'd love to have seen closer up, but we just didn't have time on this trip.

Geologically remarkably similar-looking, but 'way across on the other side of the island, the photo at the right was taken on our hike up Pen y Fan, the highest point in southern Britain, specifically in Brecon Beacons (Bannau Brycheiniog) National Park in Wales. The trail up here was well maintained, as were all the trails we hiked. Although not having to worry too much about vegetation encroaching on the path would make trail maintenance easier in some respects. Guarding against erosion from rainwater, however, is a problem not too many Texas trail managers have to contend with. Note the stream-like characteristics of the trail in the background of this photo:


In fact, pretty much all the trails I encountered bore evidence of the wet summer, even by their standards, that the UK had just experienced. And there were wonderful rushing streams everywhere. On the left is a glimpse of the steep, but lovely, trail down to Foyers Falls in Scotland, near Loch Ness. It was one of our serendipitous finds as we drove around the Loch (partly in a futile attempt at a Nessie sighting, but also to take in as much fabulous highland scenery as we could).

And below is a view from the trail we hiked in another area of Bannau Brycheiniog, a completely different hiking experience from the bare summits of Pen y Fan and its fellow Beacons.


This hike in the Park was the most strenuous walking I undertook during my whole trip, as we clambered over shelves and steps of Welsh slate, like you can see at the right here. But we loved seeing the four gorgeous waterfalls along the trail (called, appropriately enough, Wood of the Waterfalls, or Coed y Rhaeadr). Not to mention that the good exercise was both needed and welcome!

One real advantage UK hiking has over its Rockies counterparts, though, is that you don't have to deal with the thin air of extremely high altitude. It's great to have views of fabulous-looking mountains that don't require being at near-stratospheric heights to enjoy.

Another charming sidelight of UK hiking is the occasional random ruin, adding to the picturesque quality of the scenery immensely. Here's an example from the Arthur's Seat hike in Edinburgh:


The fabulous trees nourished by all that moisture are another distinction that I enjoyed. Don't get me wrong, I love walking in the Rockies and would have to pick them as a preferred location over the mountains of the UK—if I had to choose a favorite. But the trees I saw all over the UK were a real treat. At the left is a particularly scenic specimen along the Coed y Rhaeadr hike.

And below is one of the extraordinary trees we saw during an enjoyable, but completely different type of hike. This was in the artificial countryside of the Blenheim Palace grounds. A profoundly weird place, with its artificial lake and manicured, designed landscaping. But, you have to give them this: they planted some really amazing trees there....


I believe I was taken enough with British trees that I have enough pictures to make a separate post on the subject, so that will be my next Favorite Foto collection.

Historic Scotland

On the way in from the Inverness Airport on Thursday my shameful ignorance of historic Scottish geography was exposed as we saw a sign to the Culloden Battlefield. Whoa! I didn't know it was right here!

Thanks to intriguing info in our Rick Steves travel book, we decided to visit the site Friday morning and were so glad this bit of serendipity happened. The brand new visitor center is full of great displays that illuminate every aspect of this sad, but significant, story. Including a 360° video immersion room where you're in the middle of the battle, as staged by some very convincing re-enactors.

And walking the battlefield itself is a moving, haunting experience. Especially with the wind howling as it was on our day (or maybe it's like this all the time?). I haven't done much battlefield touring but my appetite was whetted by this experience. We even, perhaps, saw a marker of family history in this mournful place: were some of our Stewart relatives being memorialized by the stone shown above? Here's a panoramic view of the site. The large stone structure in the distance is a memorial cairn.


Right on the outskirts of the largest city in northern Scotland, with suburban housing developments looking on nearby, it still has a feel of the world of 1746, when much of modern history was, possibly, decided.

Rick Steves also noted another historical site nearby that sounded worth visiting—the Clava Cairns at Balnuaran. It's just minutes from the Battlefield, but being there takes you back thousands of years. The site is always open and no admission is charged, but it does have informative information boards that point out interesting archaeological features. In the midst of a lovely stand of trees, with the wind rustling through their nearly bare branches, it could have been a spooky place, but I rather found it to be peaceful and calming. I wonder if it would feel differently to stand there in the springtime? Autumn seems the perfect season for it.

Here's the first cairn we came to, looking head on into its entrance-way, which was aligned with sunset on the winter solstice.

And here's what the center of the last of the cairns looks like close up:


As a bonus, each cairn was ringed with smaller versions of the Avebury stones, one of which you can see at the left.

An altogether fascinating place! And so easy to get to and visit. Rick Steves is certainly a genius at what he does—finding neat stuff to recommend to travelers! However, I will be dropping him an email about his directions to Culloden, which need some revising. We also thought we'd email the visitor center about their highway signage: there's a brown-cultural sign at the turn-off when you're heading to Inverness from the airport, but not one heading the other way! (Tip: take the first turn you see marked Culloden.) We did a bit of extra driving trying to find it, and it's such a wonderful place they should make it as easy as possible for people to visit.

Scenic Scotland

Those of you who guessed Loch Ness in response to my teaser the other day win the prize!—any pictures of Nessie I was able to get.

Not surprisingly, that prize isn't worth much. But we weren't disappointed at the lack of reptile sightings: quite the contrary, as the scenery of the highlands that we were able to see on our quick trip north was really wonderful. The weather wasn't as good as it could have been, but it wasn't as bad, either. There was some heavy mist on Thursday, and lots of lighter mist on Friday afternoon, but Saturday, as we were leaving, it turned brighter.

Thursday afternoon, after landing at Inverness' cute little airport (just the right size for an airport, in my opinion) and picking up our rental Peugeot, we still had time for a drive and short hike in the lovely woods of Glen Affric, a bit north of Loch Ness. We hiked a well-marked loop trail whose main attraction was Dog Falls. At the left is a shot of the River Affric just below the impressive, but difficult-to-photograph falls.

The early November sunset, as well as a persistent, occasionally heavy, drizzle kept us from exploring this area further, and we headed to our small but comfy accommodations at the Drumnadrochit Hotel. Besides including a full breakfast, a wifi hotspot allowing occasional email checking, a staff of cheerful young people, most of whom were from Hungary, and welcome beds after exhausting sight-seeing, the location was gorgeous. Here's the view across the road from the hotel:


The next day we did some touring of historical sites, which I'll describe in my next post, but then headed down the Loch toward Fort William, where we'd heard the scenery was even better. We took the road less traveled along the other side of the Loch from Drumnadrochit. The narrow roads, wet conditions, and early darkness led us to cut our trip short. But we made a happy discovery along here—in addition to some great views of the Loch (in spite of the poor visibility) was a fabulous waterfall at Foyers, even the subject of a Bobby Burns poem. How Scottish could you get! Not only was the falls wonderful, but the views of the glen from various points along the path were some of the best we'd seen. Here's a sample:


Our final sight-seeing fling was a brief one Saturday morning before heading back to Inverness to catch our flight. We stopped by Urquart Castle, just up the road from Drumnadrochit, before it opened. Not regretting having to miss a detailed tour of the place, we were happy to just drink in the lovely scenery of its setting, right on the Loch, and enhanced by the proud Scottish flag flapping in the breeze.


Our return to Inverness wasn't entirely uneventful, as a flat tire needed to be changed in Drumnadrochit. But Steve handled that quickly and our little Peugeot motored just fine the short distance back to the airport on its tiny spare. Inverness, by the way, doesn't deserve the reputation we'd been given for it—namely that it doesn't have anything to recommend it except its proximity to the highlands. We thought it looked rather charming, with the Ness River running past a couple of impressive-looking churches. We didn't have time to take in any of its sights, but it did look as though it had some. It was considerably more interesting-looking than Merthyr Tydfil, at any rate.

And we also wonder about some of the advice we had from folks who said to skip the northeast end of the Loch in favor of the "more scenic" southwest end. We found the area we were able to cover in our very short days (Steve did a great job driving, but wasn't keen to take on those narrow roads on the wrong side after dark) was quite nice enough. Maybe next time we'll have time to see if these recommendations were warranted.

Highland teaser

I don't have internet access in our room here in Scotland, so don't have the time I need to keep my blogging in chronological order (next item should be the Tower of London, and I want to make that a fairly long post).

So instead I'll offer a teaser of Scottish posts to come with these pix. First, one from a haunting pre-historic site near the equally haunting, but very historic Culloden Battlefield:


And this one, which includes a slight glimpse of a famous body of water. Any guesses what it's called?


The answer, and more Scotland photos and info, in a few days.

Edinburgh, continued

[To see an introduction to our time in Edinburgh, click here.]

This is the rather imposing volcanic feature called "Arthur's Seat" that we proposed to climb as our first Edinburgh activity on Saturday. We found out later that some of the students had climbed it the previous evening and said the sunset was amazing from up there. That would have been a nice thing to see, but the trail was steep and rocky enough that I'm glad we did it in daylight (and me with my trekking poles).

It looks pretty far away and high here, but it only took about an hour to get to the top from this vantage point, which was near some public conveniences in a park across the street from the start of the trail.

As I said, the climb was a little rugged, but the views kept getting better and better, and, much as scenery such as this looks like above-treeline in the Rockies (although much greener) there's plenty of oxygen in the air.

Below you can see a sample of the views from the top. What you can't see is how incredibly the wind was blowing up there. I'm actually surprised that I could hold the camera steady. But great views in every direction. It was really neat to look out and see the North Sea and the Firth of Forth, but it was a little hazy and pictures aimed in those directions didn't really come out so well.



Here is another view from the Seat, showing the Castle that we would visit later.



Our next stop after descending from the Seat was the National Museum of Scotland, an amazing collection of objects that we were a little frustrated not to have more time to see. And we just focused on the two floors that covered Scottish history. But we wanted to be sure we allowed ourselves plenty of time at the Castle. But because of the first-rate displays, which were all explained by well-written information boards, we learned a lot. Here is one of my favorite displays, of delicately-engraved powder horns.

After a quick lunch on the run of granola bars, and a brief shopping stop along the Royal Mile, we climbed up the steep street to Edinburgh Castle. We were looking forward to exploring this ancient site, and other than being perhaps a bit too tired to appreciate it fully, we enjoyed it. I invested in the audio guide, which was probably worth the £3, although I probably didn't listen to half of its informational bits. Here is a view looking east through one of the many gun embrasures. The second church steeple from the right (the one that's sort of open in design) is St. Giles, which we saw later.

A rather unusual sight that added to our Castle visit was the end of a wedding that was being held in the St. Margaret Chapel, a tiny edifice that's the oldest surviving part of the Castle—built in the 1100's! Cool place for a wedding, complete with personal bagpiper. But how weird to have a bunch (like, hundreds) of tourists taking pictures of your wedding party as you leave the church?!

One of the more impressive buildings in the Castle compound is the the Scottish National War Memorial chapel. It was dedicated in 1927, and is very well-designed. However, the plaques and memorials inside, to the soldiers and sailors lost from different Scottish units, I find as heart-breaking as most of the interwar memorials I've been seeing. I'm impressed, but also somewhat angered, by the "glories of King and Country" that these memorials seem to feel justify the staggering losses of the Great War. Sorry, but some of these places are getting to me.

Our final verdict on the Castle was less than enthusiastic, possibly, as I indicated, because we came to it late in the day and were a bit fatigued, but it also started to get really cold while we were there, which didn't help matters. At the end of the day, we thought the £12 was a bit steep, especially given that Westminster Abbey was £11 and was, we thought, a more worthwhile site.

St. Giles, on the other hand, was a pleasant surprise because we just happened to go in. You can walk around all you want for free; they make their money by charging £2 if you want to take pictures. Which Hal and I did. Here is a sample of the gorgeous stained glass windows in the church, with an idea of the medieval character of the building, the oldest part of which dates from the 1200's.

We ended up our day with a another surprise: chicken fajitas for supper! They were pretty decent and a nice reminder of home. We found the dish fairly reasonably priced at the Frankenstein Pub, just a couple of doors down from the Elephant House, where J. K. Rowling wrote her books. (We didn't stop in at the latter, but the coffee smell was enticing!)

A fortuitous wrong turn on the way home led to a charming little alley with fantastic sunset views of the Castle—a good way to end our very full day in the city. Edinburgh's night life was just getting started, but we were really pooped and decided on taking a pass on that aspect of this amazing place.

A Taste of Edinburgh

I was pretty pooped last night (it's actually Sunday morning here) but did intend to submit a brief post. However, blogspot seemed to be down and I was really too tired to stay up waiting for it to recover. I've got some time before breakfast is served in our wonderful B&B, the kids just left to get their bus back to the car park, so I'll try to at least "publish" Edinburgh, part 1 this morning.

To begin with, I don't know the name of the lovely church we caught in the photogenic sunset light last night. There are a ton of picturesque churches here, and we only know what a couple of them are. Only having one full day here, we really didn't get to do much more than scratch the surface of this very rich tourist and cultural environment.

I have to start with the train ride here, though, since it was a very pleasant experience. About 5 hours all together, with 3 or 4 brief stops along the way, it was comfortable, convenient, and even had wireless access on board! What a civilized way to travel. And it gave us a great view of some lovely English and Scottish countryside, of which the scene at the left is typical.

Today we have to take a bus from here to Newcastle, since they're working on the tracks, but then will take up with the train from there. A new and hopefully interesting experience. Hal and Sally tell me that driving on all roads other than the freeways in the UK is very exciting (putting a positive spin on it) so we'll see how it looks from the bus window.

After depositing the kids at their hostel, my colleagues and I found our B&B, the Grosvenor Gardens, which is lovely, well-run and commodious. I'd recommend it in a heartbeat to Edinburgh travelers. The amenities in the room included this goodie tray. Yes, that's a small decanter of Scotch! I did sample it, but am not knowledgeable enough to say how good it was. But it certainly looks lovely, doesn't it?!

Not long after I settled in, and right on schedule, the kids showed up. They used a free carpark on the outskirts of town and took a bus in, which deposited them about 5 minutes away from me. We then proceeded to have a fine Indian dinner at Omar Khayyam, during which I got a blow-by-blow description of their fabulous hikes and interesting travels through Wales and the Lake District. I'm sure in the days to come Hal's blog will have lots of info on these adventures (at least, after the internet problems get fixed at the flat, which will hopefully happen Monday).

I'm going to have to quit in a second and go grab breakfast before heading to the train station, so I'll just leave you with a couple of glimpses of what I'll try and cover in the next post or two: a view from Arthur's Seat, the wonderful hike we took yesterday morning...
...A sample of exhibits at the National Museum of Scotland (that's a replica of Mary, Queen of Scots' tomb in the foreground—the real one is in Westminster Abbey but you can't take pictures there—and Sally (one of Mary's descendants? Mamaw always said....) is in the background examining the "Maiden," a sort of guillotine).



We also saw the famous Edinburgh Castle, but I'll save pictures of that for the continuation of our Edinburgh activities.