Day 13 (July 27): Heather, Thistle, and Stone Walls

This being Monday, the group wanted to explore Edinburgh without the weekend crowds. I’d seen the city a couple of times and knew that my knee would not take the pavement-pounding they’d planned, so again I bowed out. I was sorry to miss their fellowship, but not sorry to miss the throngs that would crowd the sidewalks even on a weekday.

So instead, I used AI to plan a scenic driving route around Falkland. Who knew AI could actually do something helpful and not destructive or insidious? It gave me a detailed itinerary, which I plugged into my GPS. After getting some writing done and preparing for the night’s dinner, I took a couple of aspirin and got on the road.

The first stop was a car park on a hill a mere mile out of Falkland. I pulled in, hoping to take a few pictures. But the paths up the hills beckoned—smooth, grassy, climbing gently. “I’ll just go up a little bit, to get some photos,” I said. Which I did:

This was dangerous. The further up I went, the more persistent was the call of the hills. The path was so easy, I kept climbing up for more views. Thanks to the two aspirin I’d taken earlier, my knee was complaining only mildly. As I climbed, the vistas broadened. Great swathes of heather, moss, and grasses blanketed the hills, broken only by stone walls, spear thistles, and the occasional foxglove still in bloom. In the distance, a loch shimmered.

I cannot describe how much the wind and hills and heather restored and rebuilt my spirit. Fresh, fresh, fresh. So much beauty and open space, so much to see. As I scribbled in a notebook later,

Moss and lichen,
stone and path,
bluff and glen
awash in heather, spear thistles, blaeberry, 

buttercup, cotton grass, harebell, 

primrose, mouse-ear, moss
and light—
away from me earth stretches, rolls, unfurls, lifts and rises and falls,
the whorls of God’s thumbprint.

The rest of the drive took me through more rolling hills and fields, small stone villages, and stretches of wood. I returned to the cottage renewed and full of delight.

What an astounding world God has given us to explore.