I don’t know about you but we’ve had so much rain recently, grey and wet for days on end, so when the weather forecaster said that the best day for getting out and about last week was Thursday, we took the chance to do just that and with sunshine and blue skies we headed for the wee town of Linlithgow.

This is the path which runs around the edge of Linlithgow Loch, it’s a nice walk around, apparently 2.3 miles in length, sadly the brambles here had just rotted on their stems, no blackberry gatherers in the Linlithgow area it would seem and the birds obviously weren’t interested either.

Linlithgow Palace is just a shell nowadays but is still well worth a visit, we didn’t have enough time to do that though after we walked all around the loch. The town of Linlithgow was very bustling so I didn’t take any photos of it at all, too many people around, but if you want to see what it looks like have a keek here.

This is the view of the palace from half-way around the loch.

And here we are right at the palace. This is where Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots) was born, in 1542. It looks like it would have been a freezing cold place even in its heyday but maybe with all the fireplaces blazing away and thick wooden panelling and tapestries on the walls it would have been comfortable.

The photo below is the view which you get from the palace, looking across the loch, there is actually a very busy road behind all those trees, well hidden but you can still hear heavy lorries as they go past. It must always have been a fairly busy area with horsemen coming and going on palace business over the years, I wonder if anyone has ever run a metal detector over the ground to see if anything interesting pops up.

So that was Linlithgow, and we were glad that we took the chance to stretch our legs somewhere different for a change while the weather was good as the next day we were back to grey skies and rain, but I’m not complaining really as this time last year I’m sure we had already had some snow, and this autumn has been very mild in comparison.

The loch is just a short hop from the high street and close to a play park so there are always people there with kids feeding the swans, ducks and geese with bread, despite the fact that there are signs up telling them not to do that. I really wish there was someone there to stop them because the geese were out of the water to get a better chance of getting more bread. It’s the bird equivalent of fast food, it fills them up but gives them little in the way of the nutrition that they need. I’ve never seen fatter geese, they could hardly move and I doubt that they could possibly fly. I toyed with the idea of complaining to the crazy people feeding them, but decided against it, in case I got my head in my hands!