Glen Clova walk

Here are a few pictures from my trip to Glen Clova last month. This trip was with ‘Breakaway,’ the St Andrews Hillwalking Club, which I joined because the Oxford Walking Club was a really good way to see lots of fields and country villages in southern England and I wanted to see some of the Scottish countryside. Glen Clova (‘glen’ means valley) is in Angus, a county adjacent to St Andrews’ Fife, and about an hour and a half away by bus.

I actually wasn’t supposed to go on the trip, because they only had about 50 spots on the bus and I was second on the waiting list, but some people dropped and I got to go. I was a little hesitant because this was right after my first two rowing workouts (the first circuit and technical session) and I was so sore I couldn’t walk, plus I had two rowing sessions the day after the trip, one of them at 7:15am and the other circuits. But how hard could walking around be? Breakaway trips are split into walks of different difficulties, easy, medium, high medium, high-high medium, and hard, so I figured I would just do the medium (thinking this would be 3-4 miles walking slowly).

The bus dropped the medium group off eight miles from the pub/hotel where all the groups would meet at the end of the day. Ack, a lot longer than I expected! And it was over steep hills at a very fast pace, with not a lot of breaks. Plus when we finally got to the end we realized that we still had several hours before the bus was going to take us back to St Andrews, so there was nothing to do but walk a few more miles down the valley and back! At least I got to see a lot. My feet thoroughly hurt after that and I had a full day of rowing the next day.

Even though Glen Clova is still very much in the south of Scotland, like St Andrews, it reminded me a lot of the Highlands. There were a couple things that could maybe be called 'mountains' (sort of, and by Eastern U.S. and not Montana standards), but even the hills looked pretty rugged. They were all covered with heather, which is a plant kind of like a really short sagebrush that's all over in the British Isles. I had seen it in England, but at a time of year when it was purple - in fall apparently it's brown, and I had to ask what it was. Most of the walk was along a high ridge (it was incredibly windy up there, but a sunny day) and you could see way back in the country away from the road. There were a few scattered farm buildings off in the distance in other valleys, but mostly it was very remote. We saw some free-range sheep that acted like they didn't see people very often. For a lot of the hike we went along an old dirt road that was near a rickety barbed wire fence; it actually reminded me a lot of Montana and Idaho, so the landscape wasn't altogether foreign. Still, the dominant image in my mind was of the Highlands when my dad and I drove through them a few years ago.

The view back towards the road from the steep hill we climbed to get to the ridge.


Ahhh, fresh air and mountains! The love of the countryside is one of the "things which I have won forever" through my experiences and education. I will never live in a city again!


Heather.


Landscape view, with heather all over. It's scenes like this that really reminded me of the Highlands.


The lighting in this turned out kind of cool, especially in the mud of the road that we were walking on.


As my dad will attest, two things I like to take pictures of while traveling are doorways and gates.


Climbing over a stile. After this we walked through a forest that has been carefully managed and harvested for many centuries. There were enclosures for raising pheasants, too. (Ooh, as we were driving back out on the bus I saw fields and fields full of big, fat wild rabbits. I had of course seen wild rabbits before but I had never seen actual rabbit warrens, like the ones in the book Watership Down. Whole cities of rabbits!)


Another stile. There are pine trees in Scotland!


The hikers' and backpackers' hotel/pub in the valley.


View down the valley on our second walk.


Caution: pheasant crossing.

Random add-ons

It's pretty common to hear supersonic jet noises around here, since there is a Royal Air Force base just a few miles away from the center of St Andrews, but today they must've been doing a lot of training exercises and there was practically a free air show. I was walking along the Scores (the northernmost of St Andrews' four streets, with a view of the water) when I looked up and saw two fighter jets flying together in an arc over the sea. They were so beautiful! And zipping over the water so fast. I stood and watched them make a couple loops over West Sands (the bigger beach at St Andrews) before they came in to land one after the other. As they landed I realized that one can actually see the air base from St Andrews, I just didn't know that's what those buildings the next hill over from West Sands were. After I saw the planes stop on the runway I continued walking but then looked up to see three more planes flying over the ocean in very tight formation. They flew together for awhile, made some very impressive turns that I had a good angle to appreciate, and then separated and flew there own ways. One flew right over the town! That was loud.

At the "Freshers' Fayre," where new students signed up for university societies, there were to my surprise several military groups. Officers were there recruiting for the RAF and for the army, but there was also a student society that was kind of like a national guard. There is an organization for Scottish young people and students at Scottish universities that is traditionally one of Scotland's lines of defense against attack, so some students at St Andrews go to lots of trainings for that a week (probably even more time-consuming than rowing!) and learn to fly airplanes. As I'm only here a year, I wasn't quite up for that!

Speaking of the military, on Saturday when Steph and I were wandering around looking for a good cafe-type place for writing we found ourselves in the middle of a parade of 20-30 soldiers who were just going down the street for some reason. No idea why. It was kind of funny because they were all walking two-by-two, and then they started to pass us, so we were in the middle of the line and there were two of us also.

Speaking of the military again, today was Remembrance Day/Armistice Day. The U.K. observed a moment of silence today, but I guess the main events were on Sunday, which they call Remembrance Sunday and which is a major holiday for them. On the news they showed the Queen laying a wreath before a tomb and then bowing - the monarch bows for the war dead alone. They also showed Princes William and Harry in their military uniforms with their cool swords in the ceremony, since they were part of the Queen's guard.

And speaking of Prince William, I know someone who lives next door to the flat that he lived in when he was a student here. Haha. I always thought it was cool that Prince William represented St Andrews in water polo at the national level, in the Scottish Universities Championship. Well, now I'm going to represent St Andrews in rowing in the Scottish Universities Championship! I have to say I never thought I'd be on a sports team competing against other universities...

Can't think of anything else to "add-on," so I'll finish with a "Yay, rowing!"

Internet, finally!!!

Okay, now I am actually going to write in this blog often, because I finally have internet in my apartment! First I had to get the phone line reconnected, which took awhile because they wouldn't take a foreign credit card and had me send a postal money order, and then I had to wait awhile for them to process the internet order and send me the equipment. But it's finally here! Now I don't have to walk into town to the library every time I need to check my email.

I have no classes this week because it's "reading week," which is basically the St Andrews fall break - not many people actually stay here and "read," most are at home or someplace exotic and warm. A lot of the people I know just went home to various places in England (and in the U.S.!), but my training partner went to Salamanca, Spain and someone else from rowing went to Italy. It's really, really nice not to have to go to class - I only have one hour of Latin four days a week and then four hours of seminars on Fridays, but I much prefer to do all my work independently and not have a set time to be somewhere (unless it's for rowing). I have a disorganized mind that likes to fly every which way and do bits and pieces of different things at the same time; I am quite happy to do all my independent reading/learning/writing and then turn in the project at the deadline, but I don't like being checked up on midway through. So, reading week is very nice.

This week I'm still doing some stuff for rowing, going to the gym with the few people who are still around. I had the most awesome day on Saturday! First I was in the gym for two hours doing the rowing machine, learning some new techniques for it. Afterward my coach, Steph, and I went to a tearoom/cafe/bar (I don't even know the word for it, that's not a combination usually seen in America) and sat writing for five hours! Awhile ago Steph and I had discovered that we're both writing books with the same type of ideas (hers is for young adults, but we're both working toward similar things) and that, furthermore, we are similar people in a lot of ways and like to think/talk about the same type of things. We decided that on some weekends we'll camp out somewhere and work on our books for a few hours at a time. We weren't too successful at that on Saturday - we spent a lot more time talking than writing! But still, it was really neat to be able to talk about writing with someone else. I hadn't worked on my book in a couple months because I thought that it was too juvenile and saw too many ways that it was wrong, but now I see I can at least partially fix it and I'm excited about showing it to someone else for suggestions. I'm also starting a second book involving much different ideas, but that's another story...

I spent Sunday doing all the housework that I'd been putting off, and was all set to have a productive day on Monday, but I was so exhausted from the gym in the morning (and going into the afternoon - I spent three hours there!) that I really didn't do anything else the rest of the day. Today I got some reading and other things done, but I still have several books I need/want to read this week, some assignments to do, and then a lot of writing (that has nothing to do with schoolwork). Today I went in a lot of the shops in St Andrews because I had some errands to run and also because I hadn't been in most of the interesting stores. There are quite a few stores with Scottish things, not just souvenirs but also Scottish-made goods that people buy normally, like woolen clothes, tartan scarves and blankets, and kilts (oh, yes, kilts are normal, people wear them around town all the time). The stores are putting things out for Christmas so there are a lot of neat Scottish gift boxes and cookie tins. Oooh... I just remembered Christmas pastries! In England I experienced the Christmas pie, which is a little palm-sized pie with not fruit but meat in it, and also the various other tiny pies that have normal fillings. All of these are starting to appear in the bakery windows along with some that seem to be sold just in Scotland, since I haven't seen them before, so I will have to try some of those. The U.K. does Christmas so much better than the U.S.! Not only the traditional food, but also the decorations. This town is going to have such a neat atmosphere with the lights on the gray stone medieval buildings, the clouds and cold weather, the medieval church towers, and all the people walking around in plaid wool coats. (I went in a store that sells only Christmas stuff year-round, so the excitement rubbed off on me... I love Christmas!)

Speaking of Christmas, there are less than six weeks before classes end - wow, it's gone so fast, it seems like classes have barely started! I'm going home for Christmas, which I'm really looking forward to, and then will come back sometime in the middle of January for my one exam, Latin (other things are assessed by just written work). Then, St Andrews being even weirder than Oxford in terms of breaks, there is a three-week break in January and the beginning of February: the next semester doesn't start until February 6! Hopefully there will be some rowing stuff in there to fill the time; otherwise I will be able to get a lot of writing done.