Photographs from Scotland (7)

On our last day in Edinburgh, I climbed Arthur's Seat for a view over the city and the surrounding countryside. (Although I think you actually get a better -- more detailed -- view of the city centre from Salisbury Crags, which I visited on the way back down. From there, through binoculars, I saw a puff of white smoke from the one o'clock gun on the Castle and noted moments afterwards -- one of course can't see both at the same time -- that the ball at the top of Nelson's Tower on Calton Hill had fallen.) It was a fairly grey day: some patches of clear sky, but too much cloud and haze to try taking photographs of anything too far away. (One would have needed an SLR with a telephoto lens of epically phallic proportions to resolve worthwhile detail.) The Pentland Hills, to the west, stood out; the bump of Mount Lomond was visible on the northwest horizon; the northern shore of the Firth of Forth was clear; much further away, to the east, at the mouth of the Firth, were North Berwick Law and -- beyond it -- Bass Rock, from where Simon King usually reports for the BBC's Autumnwatch (but not this time. I was slightly surprised by how white the Rock is, or at least how clearly its whiteness stood out: I know that the bazillions of gannets which roost there produce bazillions of tonnes of guano, but still....

But the real surprise about getting to the top of Arthur's Seat was the number of other people up there -- judging by their language, it appeared to be a group of German (or Austrian) students on a field geology trip. It was all a little like one now imagines the summit of Everest to be, with people queueing below the col for their five minutes of waving a flag and photographing each other before having to descend to make way for the next party. Here's a photograph: