Crow Moss

It looks like the strip wood NT0757 : Strip wood, Birny Knowe has been felled. Harperrig Reservoir can be seen to the top left.

The remains of the felled strip wood can be seen at the bottom of the photo NT0757 : Strip wood, Birny Knowe.

Seen from a Prague bound flight from Edinburgh.

Seen from a Prague bound flight from Edinburgh. Colzium is the white building surrounded by trees near the top of the photo.

I followed the course of this burn for about a mile. Not only is it quite picturesque in places, the going is fairly easy - certainly in comparison to a lot of the open country round here. West Burn joins with Mid Burn just downstream of here. After another unnamed burn to the West (following the naming pattern round here it should really be called Wester, or Westmost Burn) joins the flow it takes on its more famous name - Water of Leith - shortly before it enters Harperrig Reservoir, which starts around a mile North of this spot. The name 'Colzium', to me anyway, always has a rather ancient and menacing feel to it. Maybe it is because it contains the letter 'z'; it gives it an almost biblical importance. I have my doubts as to whether the origin of the name can really be the one which all online sources confidently suggest. Whilst the internet is a wonderful thing, this might be one of those instances in which one theory has just been copied and pasted by everybody since. Apparently it is a corruption of the old Gaelic word 'cuingleum' which is said to have meant 'gorge leap', which presumably means that in order to cross it you had to take a running jump over the water below. My arguments against are: (1) This is quite a big change in spelling/pronunciation over time. Spelling, however, varied enormously when literacy levels were low and there was no standardisation, so I am prepared to accept this might be wrong. (2) It seems too small a watercourse to have such a feature. I will at some point follow its course further though, to hunt out the supposed gorge. (3) Gaelic was rarely ever spoken round here. It may be relevant that there is a more famous 'Colzium' in North Lanarkshire which maybe does have a narrow gorge nearby. And Gaelic was spoken there to a certain degree at various points I believe. Online sources also differ in their guides to pronouncing it. These days - with this Colzium anyway - I have only ever heard it spoken as Coll-Zee-Um, with the stress on the first syllable.

All the timber fencing around this small shallow pond looked brand new, and it doesn't register on any of the reliable regularly-updated mapping websites so it must be very new indeed. Why it has come to be is anybody's guess. There are two small hills in the distance. The one on the right is Fauch Hill and the one on the left is Black Hill (which is not even dark). 'Fauch' has a variety of meanings, most of which in old Scots seem to be concerned with ploughing. It seems to have been a very general term that you can could use however you chose, so long as there was a ploughing theme in the background - fallow, ready to be ploughed, ploughed only occasionally etc. The rare meaning that might apply in this case is 'light in colour', due to it not having soil exposed. I have arrived at this conclusion due to the fact that Black Hill is not black at all. But it seems possible that a few hundred years ago, working on the land, people's eyes would be expertly adjusted to slight differences in shade and colour. Therefore, maybe Fauch Hill was slightly lighter than Black Hill once, and that's why the names came to be. It is of course quite possible too that Black Hill was once ploughed for crops. They do say that one of the effects of advances in agriculture is that 'borderline' agricultural land can now either be put to pasture or rewilded.

A shower of rain and hail is passing through.

Very much the open heather moorland of the wilder part of the SW area of the Pentland Hills between West Cairn Hill, Byrehope Mount and Craigengar.

The boundary between Scottish Borders and South Lanarkshire on the moorland ridge.

On a rather brighter day than my last visit in 2009: NT0956 : Old cairn on Colzium Hill. The black dot R of the cairn is a meadow pipit in flight.

Rough going to reach the cairn from any direction as the ground is either heathery, boggy, tussocky or sown with semi-hidden stones and small outcrops. Enjoy the trip!

I was searching for the 'Ewe and Lamb' marked in this area, expecting to see gritstone outcrops rivalling a Henry Moore sculpture, but nothing very obvious was in sight. West Cairn Hill is in the background.

I was searching for the 'Ewe and Lamb' marked in this area, expecting to see gritstone outcrops rivalling a Henry Moore sculpture, but nothing very obvious was in sight apart from these two modest boulders near the place marked. There are much more striking outcrops up on the ridge nearer West Cairn, but perhaps the name on the map here has some local story attached. Maybe the Ewe and Lamb are elsewhere, but not much else was evident.

On the moorland south of West Cairn Hill.

Starting point of one of the burns in the catchment of the Baddinsgill Burn.

The Pentlands Placenames online pdf booklet describes this small hill, a little unfairly, as a 'dull eminence'. While the flat hilltop just South of here is rather featureless, it does have quite a steep slope on its NorthWestern side as well as this substantial stone ruin. Only the first 1850s OS map annotates the building - it is a former shooting lodge. This would explain why there are still traces of there having been windows on all four sides. Whoever owned it must have had a bit of money, as people regularly used to live in buildings of this size. I had in fact assumed it was an old farm dwelling due to their being the remnants of a fireplace inside; this was obviously a luxurious hunting retreat in its day. Crosswood Reservoir can be seen in the distance with the thin sliver of Cobbinshaw Reservoir further behind.

The minor rock outcrops of Cloven Craig are visible on the skyline.

Sandstone edge, sadly too wee for climbing, but an attractive feature amongst very deep heather.