Its wednesday walk time again. My wife and I made it for a walk around the reservoirs that sit in the hills above Edinburgh on Saturday.
It really was a beautiful day, one of the best so far here in Scotland this year. There are two reservoirs, one beside the other, that provide a lot of the water supply for Edinburgh, and there are lovely walking routes around them.
We parked near the Threipmuir Reservoir, which is the higher of the two, and passed this field of sheep who looked like they were enjoying the sunshine. The view over the Pentland hills at the back was quite nice.
From there we made our way to the path by the reservoir passing this very freshly ploughed field.
It was lovely up on the reservoir and quite a few people were out using it for water sports - mostly swimming. Above you can see a few canoeing on it.
We walked down and through the connecting path to the lower of the two reservoirs - Harlaw. I really liked the stump above for some reason. This was on the path that goes to the water side at Harlaw.
This was the view at Harlaw. I just loved the colours of the yellow gorse reflecting in the orangey waters of the reservoir !
Harlaw is the smaller of the two, so we set out to walk all the way around it. There are actually 3 reservoirs that feed each other, that way they can always top up Harlaw, with the ones above it there to act as back-ups, if water supplies run low. But its Scotland and it always rains here at some point !!! Above you can see the overflow channel for the reservoir in the foreground and the control structures for opening the gates further up in the water.
Thats a better view of the control structures. On each of those piers is a wheel that allows the reservoir gates to be opened/controller to increase or decrease water flow.
And thats the view out along one of those gantries. You can make out the wheel for controlling the gate at the end.
Above is the view out east over the hills from the corner of the path at the far end of the reservoir. I just loved the green colour of the field in this view - it looks super lush.
And above is the view along the dry-stone-dyke (a wall made of stones without the use of cement) at the far end of the reservoir.
There were quite a few people out fishing and you can see two of them above on the right. The fish were rising and you could see them breaking the surface all over the place, although we never saw anyone catching any while we were passing by.
Walking around the bottom reservoir I spotted this rather bent tree !
We then came back round to the dam wall for the higher reservoir, and walked along it to take us back towards the car park. There is very little separation between the two. The lower one is just beyond the trees you can see on the right.
Both were fairly full. Its still early in the season and we have been having good rainfall, so the water levels were pretty good.
Continuing round we then saw the farmer working in the field that was ploughed. It was a beast of a machine, and it was breaking up the larger ploughed ridges into finer lumps, ready for planting I guess. The seagulls were flocking behind him to look for worms and beasties in the freshly turned mud.
We still had some time when we got to the car park, so we went a little further and took the boardwalk path out through the red moss bog. Its quite nice, but not terribly long, however we really like taking that path. It just goes round in a large circle and takes you back out near the car park.
It really was a lovely walk, the best one we've had up there this year (and may even be the first time we have been up this year). We walked for about an hour and 40mins, so probably around 4-5 miles, and really enjoyed it !
That wraps up my wednesday walk for this week - all the best from Scotland !!!
