Walking Holiday Collage

This is Arthur’s Seat, a volcanic outcropping turned into a park surrounded by Edinburgh and environs. The sticky toffee pudding at the Sheep’s Heid on the far side was magnificent. I nursed an angry British bee’s sting in the ear over it and a pint.We stayed close to the Royal Botanic Garden and de-jetlagged there. Its Rock Garden in particular was superb.Joining us for a cuppa in the Garden, as corvids harried a Buzzard above us and Dunnock, Magpie, and Herring Gulls mooched from the tables.After a few days in the Scottish capital, we walked the 59 or so miles of the Northumberland Coast Path from Berwick-upon-Tweed to Warkworth over five days. Unlike my Dartmoor walk of two years ago, this path was well-blazed, and the North Sea was ever present except for one in-land loop. While the official path itself mostly ran up on the dunes, we also had Ian Smith’s book to guide us along the shore itself. And the always amazing Ordnance Survey maps (Explorer 1:25:000 scale, map numbers 332 & 340).Rocky outcrops and curving beaches alternated along the coast. The whole trip was scheduled around the tides at Lindisfarne, a.k.a. Holy Island, whose causeway is only accessible during low tide, so our mornings usually coincided with low tides and safe access to some beaches.Sandstone, limestone (and old lime kilns), and the Whinstone Sill were our major geological features.We had to ford a few small burns running into the sea. Just before this one, a warden watching over nesting Little Terns and Ringed Plover privileged us with a viewing of the birds on the sand. The morning’s walk from Belford back to the coast was rather mizzling (a word I knew from Thoreau; it turned out to be Scots as well), very much snail weather, in the fields we edged.