Straight after our jaunt up Cairn Gorm yesterday, down to Edinburgh we headed for a few days around the city. Although I’ve been to Edinburgh a couple of times on business and passed through it a couple of other times (including during our E to W walk in 2011), I’ve never really explored the place, and the obvious objective for the first day was a walk up Arthur’s Seat.
It hadn’t even occurred to me that a hill in a city would quality for a tick on a list, but an email from Conrad last night put me right on that point, and thus we didn’t just have a walk up a hill today - we bagged a Marilyn.
Alas, the weather wasn’t being kind for our outing. The forecast had been for a dry, overcast morning. The reality was steady rain right through till noon. Thus, it was a soggy walk up to the summit, where plenty of other people had braved the weather:
Those wet, worn-to-a-shine rocks and my not-good-on-wet-slippery-rock shoes were not a good combination!
Things were rather quieter (in that we didn’t meet a soul) on the little prominence off to the north east, which gave a good view back to where we had been:
It also gave another good view over Edinburgh, but such was the greyness that none of my photos look at all enticing.
Having picked our way back down the hill to the main path, back through the city we passed, taking a minor detour to the National Gallery on our way. Whereas we had taken the bus into the city, our return was undertaken on foot (and in much brighter conditions than the morning had seen), which mean that our outing (ignoring the gallery diversion) came in at 9.2 miles, with 1200’ of ascent (some of which resulted from the not-entirely-sensible route we took to the base of Arthur’s Seat).
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