Staycation Day 1 Blackford Hill

We're having a few days staycation in our beautiful city of Edinburgh! Today we walked down to Blackford Pond as we often do. We were impressed to see a large family of mute swans, with 7 large cygnets.

Just above the swans in the trees, several birds were flitting around including this acrobatic long tailed tit

We were pleased to see several hoverflies enjoying the last nectar of the season, including this marmalade hoverfly (always a common hoverfly, but having a particularly good year this year)

After walking round the pond, we noticed the lovely new art work on the gates

Normally we walk through the Hermitage of Braid, but today we decided to walk up Blackford Hill, which may not have been the best decision given how windy it was! It's a lovely hill though with wonderful views across Edinburgh to Salisbury Crags

and Arthurs Seat (with the crags again visible on the left)

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Having recently read and reviewed Andrea Wulf's book The Brother Gardeners (you can read my review here) I was interested to hear Jenni Calder speak about Isobel Hutchison, a Scottish botanist and poet from the 1930s in an event on Women in the Archives at the National Library of Scotland yesterday. I reviewed the whole event over on my Shapeshifting Green blog here.