Lauriston Castle

Lauriston Castle is a lovely Edwardian house in beautiful grounds in the north of Edinburgh. It offers a range of events for community groups, schools and the general public and the house is open for guided tours at the weekend.

During the week you can wander round the grounds for free. There is a lovely Japanese walled garden, which I've blogged about here.

The castle grounds overlook the Firth of Forth and Cramond Island

As ever, the robins are very friendly

Two bee hives have recently been built in the castle grounds - if you look carefully in the photo below you may be able to see two bees are already flying round! (It was very mild today!)

Birds at Cramond

On a cold frosty day there's nothing like a good birdwatching walk to warm you up! Cramond is a great place to see birds and here are some of what we saw today:

robin

 

goosanders (male on left, female on right)

 

grey heron

 

We also saw a kingfisher, which flew around for a while, it's colours glowing beautifully in the sunshine! 

 

We also saw lots of oyster fungi

 

 and hairy stereum fungi too

 

 and up in the fields the Shetland ponies were very glad of their thick coats today! 

 

 Thanks Crafty Green Boyfriend for the photos of the birds and the oyster fungi

 

Italian Ways by Tim Parks

 

I've always loved travelling by train and it's also a relatively environmentally friendly method of transport. I also enjoyed our visit to Italy, many years ago now. So I was very happy to find a copy of Italian Ways, Tim Parks' account of travelling round Italy by train.

This is a wonderfully entertaining book, that uses the railways as a window on the Italian way of life, Italian history and even the Italian soul. There are humourous accounts of the idiosyncracies of the Italian rail system (and I was very relieved to find that I'm not the only person to have been caught out by the requirement to validate your ticket in the obscure yellow boxes in the station that no-one tells you about (not even the nice chatty man who sells you your ticket and must recognise your accent as not being Italian) until you get on the train and get a fine and a lecture on being a stupid foreigner.)

Anyone who has been to Italy will immediately become nostalgic for that country on reading this book and if you've not been there, you'll want to! It's also a great advert for train travel as a way of seeing a country and meeting and observing people and really experiencing the process of travelling.

My Italian teacher used to criticise people like Tim Parks and say 'no Italian would go to a foreign country and dare to write about it like that!' but actually she's wrong, there's an Italian writer who writes this kind of thing about the USA but more importantly, sometimes it takes that affectionate outsider's view to see things differently, to question the things that a native of the country would take for granted and that's one of the best things about this very readable book.

Italian Ways by Tim Parks, published by Harvill Secker.

Earth stars!

I discovered a large patch of earth star fungi in Colinton Dell today - this is a new patch that I haven't seen before and there are lots of fungi - the photo shows only three of them, but there were probably ten or so earth stars all together. They're a bit past their best but you can still see the dark brown star shapes round the white puffball type centre.

wonderful winter light

It was a cold and frosty morning, but very sunny! We went to Figgate Park for our bank holiday walk, it's a place which generally has a lot of birds and relatively reliable New Year's Day bank holiday buses.

The bare trees look wonderful in the low winter light

and the mute swans were quite regal on the Figgate Pond

Crafty Green Boyfriend got these lovely photos below

moorhen 

male tufted duck

 

Meanwhile back at home the skimmia cutting Crafty Green Boyfriend's Mum gave us as a Christmas decoration has bloomed

Happy New Year

It's an Edinburgh tradition to walk up (or at least round) Arthur's Seat on New Year's Say so that's what we do every year. It was busy today, not only are there the walkers but there's also a New Year triathlon!

We walked along the cliff path along the Salisbury Crags

and then back round on the lower level. At all points there are lovely views of Edinburgh

We then had lunch and met a friend for afternoon coffee and it was dark by the time we walked past Edinburgh Castle that currently is floodlit an eerie blue!

Grey skies and a grumpy heron

We had a lovely walk today, round Blackford Pond and through the Hermitage of Braid. Wonderfully moody skies

and equally moody waters

Crafty Green Boyfriend captured the pond's resident grey heron - we reckon it's looking so grumpy because the duck house is too small for it!

Happy Hogmanay and best wishes for 2017!