An easier walk

Ha! Today's chosen walk was through Roslin Glen Country Park. While longer than last week's it was down as easier in our minds. Three hours walking along the banks of a river, how cool is that?

Wrong!! 4 hours of hard slog over twisting muddy tracks, scrambling over rocky ledges and squirming under fallen trees. We loved every minute of it. Took a lot out of me half way round so had to keep stopping as I was feeling light-headed. I think this regime (including the exercise) is having a positive effect on my high blood pressure so the light-headedness could be my overall BP dropping. Whoo hoo if it is!

Before we began we had a few home made biscuits made from crushed nuts, lard and sultanas washed down with some good coffee. This would help give us some needed energy for the walk. The walk started off well until the trail we were on ended up right on the water's edge. Then it got a bit tricky scrambling over the rocks. Loved every second of this, probably my favourite part of the whole walk.

The ledge begins

In some parts the rocky ledge was only just wide enough and we had to jump from a high part to a low ledge on a couple of occasions. Not something you'd want to do if it had been raining, thankfully today was dry.

The picture here shows the ledge near the beginning. What is hard to see is the near vertical wall of rock and vegetation on the left.

The scenery was fantastic though and I was snapping away with my camera a lot in the first half of the walk. My camera went into my rucksack for the second part as I was getting tired and it is quite a heavy beast.

Lush surroundings

The wealth of plant-life was amazing. Everything was a lush green and filled your vision wherever you looked. We followed the river for the first half of the walk, always keeping it to our right and within hearing distance.

The trail weaved inland quite often and up and over quite steep hills. In places, where small streams fed their way down the river, it was quite muddy and navigation was a bit tricky, but always fun. We seemed to relish these small obstacles and found inventive ways of circumnavigating them.

At the point where the trail started to head back it disappeared in an open space under some trees and we struggled a bit to find it again. Off we marched confident that we had done so. We noticed some old camp fires which had presumably been used by some local anglers and a blue tent amongst the trees. On we went keeping close to the river as we knew Polton, the next town, was ahead. Up over an ancient sand dune (which was huge) and on through the trees we struggled. The trail was becoming impassable so now we knew we hadn't picked it up correctly earlier so we headed back a bit and headed in-land and up another ancient sand dune.

After asking the chap living in the blue tent for directions we eventually found ourselves on the right path and were rewarded with a superb view across towards Edinburgh. By this time my camera was packed away and I was too tired to want to get it out. The path back to Roslin was an old railway line (I think). There are a number of them in the area, the most famous of which is the Innocent Railway, and they are all quite narrow for railway lines as they hauled mostly coal and were pulled by ponies.

Back at the car we tucked into lunch, although the fact that lunch time was long gone did not stop us enjoying it. Home made ham in a nice salad, followed by blackberries and raspberries. Washed down with the remainder of the biscuits and the coffee and we were ready to head off back home.

Dinner for me was a whole chicken and a nice salad. What a way to lose weight! Another 1.5Kg (3.3lbs) lost in the last week and without really trying. That's 6.14Kg (13.4lbs) since we started!