Linlithgow Loch

 Yesterday we had a lovely trip to Linlithgow in West Lothian, a short train away from Edinburgh. Of course, when we visit the town our main focus is to walk round the loch (though we also had a morning coffee in a nice cafe and later lunch in a pub). The weather was beautiful, a light mist lifting to sunshine later, but it was worryingly warm, it's certainly not supposed to be that warm in November in Scotland! 

The autumn colours were beautiful 

 

and we were delighted to see plenty of wildlife, including this very friendly Robin 

this Cormorant drying our its wings 

and this Great Crested Grebe in winter plumage

 We were also happy to find this lovely arrangement of lichens 

Linlithgow Palace (the birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots) sits by the shores of the loch and you get lots of great views as you walk around the lochside path  

 

Autumn Colours in the Meadows

 After tutoring my Friday morning creative writing class, I usually walk through the Meadows, and today the cherry trees were as beautiful as they are, more famously, in Spring. 

 

The Sycamores are surrounded by their beautiful fallen leaves too

 

The Importance of Not by Dorothy Baird

 

Dorothy Baird is an Edinburgh based writer, who comes along to one of the writing groups I facilitate. She has published two collections of poetry and this newly published pamphlet was a winner in the 2024 Poetry Space Pamphlet competition. 

It's a beautiful wee selection of poetry about things that are missing, fading memories, lost loved ones, the empty nest and the Sycamore Gap, the last of which is reflected in the cover design by Hanni Shinton. Nature is essential in this collection, from the "squirrel that could clearly run the country / with its problem solving" (You Can't Stand in the Same River Twice) to the "blackbird in his widower's weeds" (Therapy of Vowels), the "otter, the seals and the sleek wheel of a porpoise turning in the blue" (A Small Life Against the Timeline of Everything) and skylarks singing in many poems. 

I was taken right back to my own childhood by "Memories are Lonely things to carry alone" with it's description of a child's den under a rhododendron bush, my childhood den was under a sycamore tree, that has since been removed from the garden I grew up in, just as the poet's rhododendron bush is no longer there. 

 There are moving poems here about her father's dementia and his difficulties coping with the social distancing imposed by COVID-19 lockdowns 

"On the way out, she opens the door
with her sleeve covered hand and smiles
across the distance he wants to close
and she has to maintain, pushing back
against thousands of years of evolution
and the magnetism of family"

Social Distancing 

But in all the grief and sadness, there is always solace and the comfort of nature, and "snowdrops / spread among the stones like small bulbs of hope" in the cemetery (Carpe Diem). 

This is a closely observed, acutely felt and beautifully written pamphlet.   

The Importance of Not by Dorothy Baird published (2025) by Poetry Space. 

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My latest Substack post 'Art and Activism', went up yesterday, you can read it here. 

Autumn Colours over the weekend

 On Saturday we walked round Saughton Park and in between the showers I captured some of the lovely autumn colours on camera

 The cherry trees look particularly beautiful at this time of year, especially when viewed in full sunshine against a clear blue sky  

Yesterday, I met a friend to go to the Resistance exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland Modern 2 Gallery. Described as  "How protest shaped Britain and photography shaped protest", it covers all types of British protests including environmental protests from early protests against birds being killed so their feathers could be used in hats (a protest which lead to the formation of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds)); the 1932 mass trespass on Kinder Scout, highlighting the lack of public access to open spaces; and the 1971 Friends of the Earth Bottle Dump which protested the withdrawal of returnable bottles by a major drinks brand (you can read an excellent article here, about the legacy of that campaign). So it's well worth catching if you're in Edinburgh (it runs until early January.)

While I was waiting for my friend, I took some photos of the autumn colours in Dean Cemetery, which can be seen over the wall from the grounds of the art gallery

 

Stinkhorn by Sion Parkinson

 I attended an event at this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival at which Sion Parkinson was speaking and I bought the book after the event. 

This beautifully illustrated book offers a fascinating and often eccentric look at the famously smelly group of fungi known as stinkhorns, a wider look at the relationships between smell and sound and the relationship between bad smells and epilepsy (which the author was diagnosed with a few years ago). The book takes in everything from natural history to the music of John Cage (who himself was fascinated by fungi).

The stinkhorn fungus itself is not only smelly but noisy. The reader's first reaction to that comment might be an impatient 'oh for goodness sake, fungi don't make noises' but "The audible hum in the space surrounding the stinkhorn does not, of course, resonate from the mushroom itself, but is the sound produced by a swarm of several species of fly that are almost always found about it. ... Houseflies hum not with their mouths but with the beating of their wings... in the key of F major. The noisier blowfly Collophora vicina one of the most frequent flies to visit the stinkhorn, flaps its wings at a more bassy .... pitch somewhere between D and D sharp".

This is one of the things I liked most about this book, the way it forces the reader to think about our senses differently. The occasional reaction of 'oh for goodness sake' quickly becomes 'wow, that's fascinating'. 

Stinkhorn by Sion Parkinson, published by Sternberg Press.  

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My latest Substack post 'Why Did I study Botany?' is now up! You can read it here.  

 

Customised Apron

This apron was in a bit of a state, the straps were worn and there were holes in it. So I decided to repair and upgrade it. I sewed brightly coloured patches over the holes, made new straps from the handles of a tote bag that I'd repurposed as a cushion cover and added a flowery pocket for good measure. 

 So now it looks better than ever and is even more practical, as I can store things in the pockets! 

Autumn Colours on Corstorphine Hill

 Yesterday we had a lovely walk, enjoying the autumnal colours of Edinburgh's Corstorphine Hill. 

I find autumnal colours tricky to capture effectively on camera, it really does depend on there being enough sunshine and for large parts of yesterday's walk thre was ample sunshine so some of the photos turned out quite well. 

At the top of Corstorphine HIll is the Corstorphine Tower, which was built by William MacFie of Clermiston as a memorial to Sir Walter Scott, in 1817, the hundredth anniversary of the author’s birth. The tower is open on Edinburgh's Doors Open Days and on Sunday afternoons during the summer, but for the rest of the year, you can only view the outside

Corstorphine Hill is well known for being a good place to find a variety of fungi, both edible and inedible. We found several Porcelain fungi on one tree and managed to get some photos, the best of which is below 

Other than the Porcelain fungi, we didn't see as many fungi as we might have hoped. We did however have a thoroughly enjoyable walk!