Autumn Sunshine

It has been beautiful here today. I’d been planning to take the bus to Dumfries, to get some library books, but when I woke up the sun was shining on the hill and the sky was a cloudless blaze of deep blue. So me & B went off for a walk instead.
With my knees, we couldn’t walk very far, of course. We first drove up the road to Mossdale, then took the car along the disused railway line towards Arie. We parked it about a mile along, just past Stroan Loch, and walked up the track past Arie farm. By the time we got to the gate that led into the forested section, my knees were twinging, a sure sign that I had walked enough. So we slowly walked back again, stopping several times for me to rest. It was a bit of a disappointment, having to stop – if we had managed about another mile and a half, we would have come to Loch Skerrow. B’s been there, and says i’s a wonderful place – just birds and hills and the odd sheep.
But it was a nice walk anyway. The hedgrows were filled with blackberries, rosehips, hawthornberries and rowanberries. As always, I had bought along a plastic bag and collected quite a few blackberries and rosehips, for winemaking – rowanberries are mildly toxic, while hawthornberries are simply tasteless (even the birds don’t touch them until there is nothing else to eat). And it was good to get out in the sunshine and gaze across all that empty landscape.
That particular bit of line was only closed in the 60s, as part of the Beeching closures. It ran from Castle Douglas to Newton Stewart, and would be a fantastic tourist attraction if it were reopened. It would also be very useful to some of the natives – for instance, Arie farmhouse is just a hundred yards or so from the line. Getting there by vehicle involves going over a mile or so of rough track; it was obvious, with a track going from the house to a gate onto the line, with a large postbox beside the gate, that the train used to stop there and drop deliveries and perhaps passengers.

Once home, I got out the map and calculated that I had managed to walk nearly three miles altogether. Not bad going for me, these days. But not too good when I remember how, less than five years ago, I could easily have mamaged three times that without even stopping.
Bah.