Climbing the Mystic Mountain

On Tuesday I completed one of the adventures that I really wanted to do from when I first arrived here. I climbed Arthur’s Seat. The mountain, looming over Edinburgh at 823 ft. dominates the landscape even more than their majestic castle. The whole family had climbed the Salisbury Crags on the day after Ana arrived and the climb honestly was a pretty good struggle for me. I had injured my knee by stepping in a stump hole while on a walk at Flo back in the early autumn. It had prevented walks for the whole winter and was still acting up as late as the trip we took to the Zoo back in April.

We started Tuesday at about 9:40 on a cold but clear morning. Jim kept Bo and Tasca and I set out for our little adventure. Tasca insisted that it would rain sometime that morning, Scottish weather being as changeable as it is, and took rain gear for us both.

“It won’t rain today.” I pontificated, looking at a blue sky with small clouds scudding by.

Famous words to remember.

We went up St. Leonard’s lane, and then took The Queen’s Drive around the mountain to the south, past Duddingston Loch. That road climbed pretty gently, with sidewalk all the way, until we left it and began our upward climb on the grass-covered slope. Everything went well and we made good time as we admired the views that were showing themselves as we climbed ever higher. I thought that we were going pretty fast, but this Scottish guy with a child on his shoulder came from pretty far below us to reach the top sometime before us.

We met him on his way down and he said that the wind was too cold up there for the child. He wasn’t kidding.

At the point where the grass pretty much stopped and the bare rocks began, there were several paths upwards, all more or less precarious. I chose the one with the steps and we continued to climb. The wind was gusting from thirty to forty miles an hour and the temperature was somewhere below fifty degrees F. and felt like ten below when it hit you. The top has several small flat areas that held shallow pools of water. We took photos, and met a group from Ohio who were in Edinburgh for a wedding. Both the groom and the bridegroom were from Ohio, but they were going to live in Edinburgh. I took pictures of the city, and we started down.

We descended the eastern side, hoping for an easy time on the gentler northern slope, and that we might catch a bus home from near Holyrood Palace where we would reach level ground. We stopped at a sheltered place among the very prickly gorse to eat a small snack and have some water. As we continued down from there a few drops of moisture fell and Tasca felt that she had been vindicated for carrying the rain gear and told me so several times. (Even though I never needed to wear it.)

Farther down the northern slope there are the ruins of a fourteenth century chapel, (a very small one.) and we made a brief detour to visit it. The wind was blowing even harder, nearly lifting us off our feet, so we made the visit pretty brief.

This is my last week in Scotland since I leave on Sat. morning. I will post in this blog another time or two and then finish it off when I get back to Flo on Mon. or Tues.