Scottish flashes

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Holyrood Dawn
The Edinburgh we love:

This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks your heart again and again.
       -- Alexander McCall Smith

The view above is Holyrood Park in the early morning, but we have seen a thousand vistas just as beautiful.

We have commented before on travelling through the countryside and sweeping around a bend to be astonished and delighted by profusions of green and blue and yellow. The last was a surprise to us, we didn't realize how much bright yellow there was, especially in the Spring.

The yellows come from huge fields of rapeseed, braes covered in gorse, fields of daffodils, and verges bright with an honour guard of dandelions.
Daffodils

Dandelions

Gorse

Rapeseed

These expanses of yellow are offset by a profusion of tiny flowers in the grass in a multitude of colours. But there is lots of green, and of course, trees in abundance.
Dalkeith Chapel's private wood
Dalkeith Chapel has its own private wood behind the parking lot--well, more of a copse--but it links with a green belt running though that part of the countryside.

More of the Edinburgh we love is the Scottish enlightenment, a period in the nineteenth century when there was a profusion of Scottish philosophers and writers, expounding great ideas. The part-built parthenon on Calton Hill is a reminder of that age, along with memorials to various great people all over the hilltop.

Not to mention the Scots language. (Translation: let's talk about the local language) Yes, "outwith" is a real Scots word


Talking of wealthy people and their vanity projects, here's another: William Wallace, the Scots war hero, was famous for winning the battle of Stirling in 1297. This particular monument in the Borders area looks out nobly over a farmer's fields, and to reach it you travel on a B road for a while and then walk quarter of a mile through the woods.
The inscription below the statue reads

Erected by David Stuart

Erskine, Earl of Buchan

WALLACE

GREAT PATRIOT HERO!
ILL REQUITED CHIEF!
MDCCCXIV


There are so many other things, strange, wonderful and beautiful, to add to an endless list of things that have charmed us, but we'd rather get this brief entry published than delay it endlessly, so let's finish with one last quote about Edinburgh.

"This profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock is not a drop scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of reality." R. L. Stevenson


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