Another sunny Saturday, off to the Ochils with the dear boys, where we were to attempt to climb the escarpment up from Alva and then do a horseshoe walk taking in a couple of hills.  It was steep up, with the customary great views, interesting features, and plenty of scrambling opportunities…

…a picnic spot with a neat summit cairn, and contours on the map, but alas no name…

…but the climb had taken its toll, so we settled for the more substantial cairn on the summit above the impressive crags of Craig Leith as our top.  Alexander’s turn to model the summit T-shirt!

We had a lovely week in Donegal with our friends Steve and Heather and their kids – beaches, surfing, cycling, horseriding – but no hills!  After we’d returned home, they bravely headed off on a camping holiday at various points along the west coast of Scotland – the weather, by now, having returned to standard Scottish summer ‘changeable’!  They called in to see us on their way back south, and after a long drive, Steve was keen for a walk, preferably going up something.  Sensing a ‘two birds with one stone’ opportunity, I quickly located a hill with a name we could go up, fairly close to home (time was limited), and off we went.  Loss Hill is a fairly unremarkable rounded lump at the west end of the Ochils, we approached it round the edge of a ploughed field, over a fence and up.  But the views were great – past Dumyat over the Forth valley, west and north to Ben Lomond, the Trossachs, the Perthshire hills.  And the company was splendid, thank you Steve!

A Saturday morning at the height of the Edinburgh Festival, where better to head for a solitary stroll than Arthur’s Seat?  Strangely, in all my years of coming to Edinburgh, my first time up.  Needless to say it was hoaching, “so meny peple langages and tonges” (I never expected to refer back to my medieval studies in this blog…), a diversity matched by a remarkable range of footwear and clothing, some appropriate for the climb, some rather less so!  It was a great walk to do with the boys, we had a lot of fun looking at Edinburgh from above, spotting things we knew and seeing how they fit together, and thinking about the evolution of cities from higgledy-piggledy old centres to formal town planning, suburban drift, and squeezing things in the spaces remaining.