Hermitage of Braid

Today we were at the Meadows Festival, one of the community festivals in Edinburgh that happen before the big festival season gets underway. After yesterday's glorious sunshine, today was dull and cool, but there was good music from local bands, a good selection of Scottish beer and a range of stalls selling locally made crafts, antiques and second hand stuff. Also an entertaining variety of dogs - for the first time there was a dog show (run by the Dogs' Trust), with the doggy dash, though not all participating dogs really did dash, some were rather slow and one sat down halfway through!

Earlier in this week, we had a bank holiday visit to the Hermitage of Braid, a nice wooded area along a stream, called at this stage the Braid Burn though it is known as the Figgate Burn at another point along its length. There were lots of beautiful ferns which made wonderful subjects for shadow shots.

We also took a different path than usual, which turned out not to really be a serviceable path any more (it was eroded away to a tiny track on the side of a steep slope!), but it did offer us excellent views of the tree planting that is going on in the Hermitage. In areas it looks quite a mess, with the old plantation trees being chopped down (they had been planted too close and the council never made its intended income from them) and new native species being planted to recreate the original woodland. In the photo below, the small green tubes you can see in the clearing are the newly planted trees and the mature trees are the native trees that have been around for a while!

It will be a few years before some parts of the area look properly like a woodland again, but it will be lovely and overall there's still a lot of mature trees for birds to nest in. Here's one of the old trees in the area, to give an idea of the future for the area.