From a distance it looks like quite a few of the trees are still comletely bare but they all have some growth I’m sure, although they are definitely further behind than usual. We’ve had such weird weather recently that they really don’t know whether it’s spring or winter.

Going for a good walk is an enjoyable way of burning off some calories and cheaper than joining a gym, in fact it costs nothing but time. It’s a shame we don’t all have somewhere nearby us which we can go and have a wander around to get some fresh air.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if the scientists could invent something like the holo-deck on Star Trek and you could decide where you wanted to spend your leisure time and suddenly just be there. Where would you choose to go?

These are the photos which we took on Sunday, just to compare the leaf growth later in the season.

This is the crop growing in what was that bare ploughed field. As you can see, a lot of the trees still seem to be very bare.

The same field a bit further on. I have no idea what the crop is.

One of the trees which is well in leaf now, some of them still have very little green showing. I believe this is a field maple.

Last time I didn’t take any photos of the golf course which is on the left hand side as you walk up the hill into the farmland but it might be of interest to golfers.

I must admit there are some lovely trees on the course.

Obviously this is just a teeny wee bit of the course. It was designed by Tom Morris in 1904 and if you’re interested in learning more about Kirkcaldy Golf Club, have a look here.

More photos tomorrow.

The next three photos are of some of the local houses which I particularly fancied the look of. The one below is so cute a wean/kid could’ve drawn it.

This one must once have been two flats, as you can see the window at the bottom on the left hand side was originally a doorway. The orange coloured roof tiles are called pan tiles and they were widely used on the east coast of Scotland but they originally came from Holland, they were used as ballast in ships which sailed here.

The one below is altogether much grander and as soon as I saw it I thought it looked very similar to the houses you see in France so I wasn’t surprised to see that its name is Marionville.

This one is of Elie taken from the beach in Earlsferry which is just off the main street there. They are nice wee places to visit but I really wouldn’t want to live there, they feel so remote and there’s not much in the way of shops at all. I don’t fancy having to travel miles to the nearest supermarket when we eventually downsize, so we won’t be moving to this area. The search continues!

Onward and upward! A golf course does bite into the farmland but I try to ignore that fact as there are so many of the flaming blots on the landscape around Fife.

Yet another path which is going to look entirely different within a couple of weeks.

Some daffodils on the edge of the path.

Eventually you reach this ruined tower which I think has something to do with the Scott family of Michael Scott fame.

Further on you get this view of the tower and you can see that there are people living right next to it in converted farm buildings.

Looking in another direction you can see a railway viaduct which is still in use and the Firth of Forth beyond it. The hills of North Berwick on the other side of the Forth are visible if you click to enlarge.

This is Jack yomping along amongst the broom which is blooming early this year, some of it has been flowering for weeks. This part of the countryside was a railway track which was closed down in the 1960s when Dr Beeching devastated the British railway system, cutting off many rural areas completely. It later transpired that Beeching had an ulterior motive as he had gained financially from the exploit. Surprise surprise!

A close up of the broom, so called because it was cut and used as brooms in the distant past. Its botanical name is Planta genista and it is what the Plantagenets took their name from as it was their emblem.

As you can see the ground here is very marshy and some of it is flooded despite the fact that it has been really dry recently.

On the way back home now and I took this photo of the tree shadows on a ploughed field, it looked much better in reality but it’ll be interesting to see the contrast when all the leaves are burgeoning in a few weeks.

More tree shadows.

It’s nice to be able to have a walk in the countryside on my doorstep but it has to be said that there’s not much in the way of wildlife. We met four horses, one flying goose, one boxer dog, one rottweiler(scary), we heard one cockerell and said hello to two friendly farm women – and that was it, apart from one very long-dead sheep. It took us two hours and ten minutes to complete the walk and if I sat in my garden for that long I would see hundreds of birds visiting it. The countryside seems to be fairly bereft of birdlife, I suppose there are richer pickings for them in gardens.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed your walk, we went home and made some coffee, so imagine you’re having some coffee/tea and cakes along with us, I wish I could offer you some real ones but at least the virtual ones are calorie free!

This is a carved thistle at the beginning of the walk which has been made from an old tree stump. The path leads you to a wee stream or burn which is quite pretty as it tumbles over the rocks. I think this stream fed one of the many mills which used to make linen in the town.

The field on the other side of the burn is home to a couple of very quiet horses who are obviously great pals. They both came over to have a look at us but only one came down into the stream to have a nice drink. At the moment the wild garlic is just beginning to flower and the air is fairly pungent with it, it seems to be taking over the whole area.

The horses didn’t stay long and then ambled back to their favourite corner of their field.

At the end of the path we turned right and walked up a fairly steep farm track. The trees are still bare as you can see, apart from all the ivy which is galloping up their trunks and throttling them. I’d pull it all down if they were my trees. I’m going to go back this way in a couple of weeks just to see how different it all looks.

When you reach the top of the track there’s a good view of open fields, I think in a few weeks this place should be transformed when all the trees come into leaf and the crops start growing – whatever they are.

I don’t know about you, but I think this ploughed field is a thing of beauty. It must be quite a skill to be able to plough on what is quite steep and undulating land. It looks like it has been quilted.

This is another pair of horses which are further up the hill, they were too busy eating to even notice us, it’s nice that they seem to keep them in pairs so that they are company for each other.

The walk took us just over two hours but it was such a lovely day and there was plenty to see, it’s just great to be able to stretch your legs somewhere different after the winter. Don’t put your virtual boots away yet. The walk is only half done. Come back tomorrow for part two!

This is all part of the Fife Coastal Path as you can see from the map board. This area was mined for coal until quite recently and linen was also made here.

The photo below is of the side of a rock face on the shore, but it isn’t solid rock, there’s a cave behind it, with the cave mouth facing out to the sea.

THis is the cave which is in the rock and it’s one of a series of caves which were in use as long ago as Pictish times. There is some cave painting in some of them and it’s thought that they were not used as homes but were more likely workshops, possibly for people working with silver. The cave is actually much bigger than it looks here, it’s a deep and very high cavern. Apparently the Picts had warmer, drier homes nearby, which is just as well because as these ones are right by the sea they would have been very draughty and absolutely freezing at the best of times.

This is one of the smaller caves but it isn’t so easy to get to as it’s quite high up on a bank.

And the photos below are of the view which they had from the caves, I don’t suppose it will have changed much in the thousand years or so since the Picts inhabited the place.

You can just see the Bass Rock on the left in the photo below if you click on it to enlarge it. The rock is home to thousands of seabirds, and nearer the middle is North Berwick Law.

Time Team had a dig around the area a few years ago and if you’re interested you can see photos of what they got up to here.

Anyway, I did take a couple of photos of a train on the bridge when I was there a couple of weeks ago but I didn’t get around to blogging about them. I just wanted to show the scale of the whole thing, fairly massive I think you’ll agree! The photo below is of a train just going on to the Forth Bridge.

If you look closely below you’ll be able to see the same train right in the middle of the bridge, it looks like a toy. As I said before, the whole bridge is massively over-engineered, deliberately so to give people confidence that it would be safe to use and wouldn’t collapse in a storm as the original Tay Bridge did.

Somehow it still manages to look elegant, despite the tons of iron which it’s made from.

You can’t go to South Queensferry and not take some photos of the Forth Bridge, so here they are!

The Hawes Inn appears in Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Kidnapped. As you can see the approach to the bridge is more or less straight above the inn but of course the bridge wasn’t there at the time that Robert Louis Stevenson was writing about.

The photo below is of the main street in South Queensferry, I think it’s quite unusual to have a two tiered street with a pavement and houses being situated over the top of the shops.

This vintage car came tootling along just as I was taking the photos, it was like something that Toad out of The Wind in the Willows might have driven. They must have been freezing! I wouldn’t mind going for a drive in it on a hot day though.

As you can see, they have some olde worlde streetlamps in South Queensferry which fit in nicely with the age of the buildings. Even although it was a cold day it was still busy with locals and day trippers, there are quite a few eateries in the town and I think it’s a favourite place for people living in Edinburgh to visit.

Some of the buildings are really quite ancient, as you can see the date on this pub is 1683.

This photo below is of Jack (husband) eyeing up one of the boats which has been lifted out of the harbour but I don’t think he’ll be taking up sailing.

This is one end of the town from the harbour. It’s a nice wee place to have a bit of a stroll around.

It was reading Margaret of Books Please review of a Catriona McPherson book which is set there which made me think it was about time we had another look at South Queensferry. The last time we were there was during the summer when we took a trip on one of the boats which sails regularly to the island of Inchcolm. It’s a good day out, when the weather’s fair. You really wouldn’t want to be stuck out on an island in the middle of the Forth if there was the chance of a howling gale and rain blowing up. You can have a look at my Inchcolm post here.

I read The Pirate as part of the November’s Autumn classic challenge.
All the nice girls love a sailor, so THEY say – but what sort of girls like a pirate? My sort of course, I’ve always had a bit of a yen for the pirate type, in fiction anyway, which is why I opted to read this book. I can’t even read the word pirate without saying – aarrr Jim lad to myself, that’s Long John Silver of Treasure Island fame of course.

As I said previously this book was a very slow starter and I kept wondering when there would ever be some pirate action. It didn’t come until about two thirds of the way through the book. I was reminded of a heart monitor because The Pirate is very wordy and Scott does quite a lot of rambling for no good reason really, so it sort of flatlines and then there’s the odd spike of interest or excitement. But those bits are good and in the end I was glad that I hadn’t given up on it.

The action is set on Zetland, which is what we call Shetland nowadays, a group of islands off the north coast of Scotland. Mordaunt Mertoun is a young man who has never known his mother and has been brought up by a very cold and unloving father. When Mordaunt sees a ship being wrecked on the rocks near his home he has to save a sailor who is in danger of drowning, despite the fact that the Zetlanders don’t approve of such actions. In a harsh landscape where scavenging for goods from wrecked ships helps the islanders to survive, so they don’t want the complications which shipwreck survivors bring.

The survivor is a young man called Clement Cleveland and as predicted by the Zetlanders he brings no good to Mordaunt, in fact Cleveland turns Mordaunt’s friends and neighbours against him, particularly the sisters Brenda and Minna.

It’s a long book and I’m not going to say much more about the storyline but I have to say that although it dragged along slowly at times I did enjoy the atmosphere and descriptions of Shetland and later Orkney. The story is set not all that long after Shetland became part of Scotland, you might not know that up until the 15th century Shetland was part of Norway but it was given to Scotland as part of a dowry payment from King Christian of Norway on his daughter’s marriage. So there was a big Scandinavian influence and at the time The Pirate is set the islanders see the Scots as foreigners.

Walter Scott has woven Norse mythological tales into the storyline with the result that I want to read more about them, so that’s a plus point I think. I especially liked the character of Norna of Fitful Head who is a sort of white witch/soothsayer and makes a good living selling fair winds to fishermen and sailors, what a great idea! The population is generally wary of her and wants to keep in her good books.

Fitful Head is an actual place and you can see some wonderful images of it here and here.

So as I said before, reading The Pirate was a bit like wading through porridge at times, without the benefit of sugar or syrup but on balance it was worth it, if only to find out about Fitful Head, it might be added to our places to visit list!