Edgehead Wood

Bridge over the Gogar Burn about 2 km from its source on Corston Hill. The road is the unclassified road from the A70 Lang Whang north to Ormiston.

Looking across pasture and mole hills from near the entrance to Selm Muir Forest on Leyden Road.

A small farm between Selmmuir Forest and Kirknewton.

Woodland near Kirknewton.

An airfield on boggy ground beneath the Pentland Hills. It is used for training with gliders, but there are often helicopters about. There is talk of using the site to build a new army base replacing the Edinburgh barracks.

The field is between the A70 Lang Whang road and the Water of Leith.

A small windowless building with a substantial fence. There are several unexplained buildings along this road and I do know that there is a seismology station in the area.

The Edinburgh Lanark road (A70).

A dairy farm.

The Edinburgh to Lanark Road.

A very wet woodland.

A faint path on the eastern side of this small hill. Arthur's Seat and the Pentland Hills are visible in the distance.

There are various tracks and paths in this woodland in West Lothian.

This stone isn't shown on any current maps, or even in the vast archaeological database on the Canmore website (which is run by an arm of Historic Environment Scotland), which is highly unusual. Not does it appear on the 1960s 1:2500 scale OS map. An 1890s OS map does mark a 'stone' at what I'm pretty certain is this same spot though. This is itself also strange as it is clearly a boundary stone, which, if this obvious, should always get marked as such. 'MARCH' is inscribed on two sides of the top face of the stone, presumably to denote that these two sides were at the boundary - which ties in with the stone being located at the edge of this previously smaller wood on the earlier map. 'March' is a Scots word for boundary, and is still quite commonplace in street names, though it is now seldom heard in everyday speech. There is also a date inscribed towards the middle of the top face, which probably says '1837'. There were no inscriptions on any of the vertical faces. I have emailed Historic Scotland with the details of my find and await with interest to see what, if anything, happens next! Update : 7/3/22 To my surprise, Historic Scotland undertook a field survey of this site less than a fortnight after my email. Therefore a far more professional archaeological description of the stone can now be found on the Canmore website! A number of other boundary stones, and former boundary stone locations, have been added to their database as a result of the survey. I never put links on these write-ups as eventually they all become obsolete, but the Canmore ID for the site is 371251.

I don't really have an opinion on whether these creations are right or wrong, so I just report what I see. The Gogar Burn has been dammed at this point to create a tiny water body, presumably to attract wildfowl and then kill them. The bit of wood at the bottom right of the picture is the edge of the shooting enclosure, and there was a bird-feeding tub lower down, at the point where plastic pipes from the pond lead into the burn proper. Being local, the 'Gogarburn' is always linked with traffic congestion on the A8 near Edinburgh airport, and it always seems slightly ridiculous to think it is based on such a tiny watercourse. It does of course get bigger downstream but it certainly punches above its weight! There were lots of bird-feeders and grouse about in the small wood just to the South of this spot.

I did ponder about whether I should submit this picture, on account of the unusually high number of caravans sitting in the grounds of The Paddocks, a house situated a mile or so outside the village of Kirknewton. However, it turns out that this is not an under-the-radar caravan selling enterprise; planning permission was granted a few months ago to allow the siting of 33 holiday lodges here, so early business activities are obviously underway. The resplendent shepherd's hut (or gypsy caravan - is there any difference?!) must surely be earmarked as the piece de resistance of the new caravan park, and for all I know there were a couple of happy campers inside. The picture was taken from the private road leading to Ormiston Farm Steadings.

Alongside a row of mature beech trees