Walking about

‘A beguiling gloom’ 14 th October 2017 By mid-October the shooting season is well underway, attracting a large number of visitors to the area to partake in the dubious pleasure of blasting away at a range of feathered creatures. By accident we stumble across what we assume is a sort of open air game bird factory on our weekly perambulations around the Border countryside. Another overcast and gloomy morning but with a forecast of thinning cloud and some sunshine by lunchtime. Destination today is Seathope Law, sitting back from the A72, at a height of 542 metres; it sits close to the small hamlet of Clovernfords. We park next to a collection of houses scattered within the precincts of Holylee farm. Beyond the farm yard the track passes a well-built cairn marking a ‘holy well’ and a small damned up section of water, before striking uphill and away from Perlooie   burn, gurgling its way downhill to the Tweed river in the valley below.     It is here we begin to experience the ‘ph

The mark of man October 7th 2017 Lindean reservoir sits on the high ground between Galashiels and Selkirk, about four kilometres east of the A7. Much of the site was dug out by hand back in the 18 th century when farmers extracted the lime rich marl clay as fertiliser. Now an impressive stretch of water with the lime rich soil, unusual in Scotland, maintaining a diverse plant population. We circle its northern bank on a dull, windy Saturday morning in early October before taking a sharp turn onto a path that runs perpendicular to the loch and running alongside the towering telecommunications tower that occupies this site. Tethered to the ground by soaring steel cables, the mast itself and the building that sits beneath it are odd additions to the landscape, military in appearance but nothing more interesting than a radio and TV communications tower, put in place in 1961 to bring ITV to the South of Scotland. Odd too its existence in this age of satellites. We drop back onto