It
has been snowing. The snow has turned to
slush and ice. So today I didn’t venture
far, my walk taking me through Portobello and up to Figgate Park and around the
pond there.
Figgate
Park is nestled between Portobello and Duddingston. The main East Coast railway line from
Edinburgh to London runs past the park, and it is surrounded on the other sides
by various housing estates. The park is about a kilometre long and at the east
end there is a large pond. This used to
be a claypit, which supplied the potteries in Portobello. It is now a habitat for lots of birds. The park was formally opened in 1938.
The
name of the park comes from the burn that runs through it and from the old name
for the land it sits in, Figgate Muir. Figgate
Muir was an area of land on the east side of Edinburgh that now forms the main
part of Portobello. In Cassells Old and
New Edinburgh, Vol.3 (1883) it is described as ‘…a once desolate expanse of
muir-land…which latterly was covered with whins and furze, bordered by a broad
sandy beach and extending from Magdalene Bridge on the south perhaps to where Seafield
now lies, on the north-west.’
The
park was busy today with everyone doing their daily Covid walk, or slip and
slide in the slushy mess of last nights snow.
Disconsolate looking ducks sat on the ice of the pond while a group of
swans swam in the small area that hadn’t frozen over. Noisy seagulls circled around hoping to spot
someone throwing something edible to the other birds. Children screamed and demanded attention from
their worn out parents, while an occasional train roared past.
I
found some quiet places in the park to take a few photographs. Then in another quiet spot, in between some
reeds on the bank of the pond, I left my Skulferatu. I placed it on some pockmarked, icy snow, so
it should fall down between the reeds and into the pond when the snow melts.
The
coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are:
Latitude 55.949871
Longitude -3.124324
