The Green, Green Hills Of Home

I decided that a gentle re-introduction of my fair self to my new/old surroundings would have to include a walk in the woods at the earliest opportunity. Day Two Back Home was suitably early opportunity!

It was gentle in that Magus Muir (or, as Google insists ‘Bishop's Wood', being, as it is, the scene of Archbishop Sharp's murder in the 17th century) is only just under a mile from where I'm staying. It was not gentle in that there be hills in them thar... hills.

Don't be fooled by the benign degree of the slope on celluloid. Nah-ah. That, there, is the Valley of the Kinness (the name of the village as translated from the Scots Gaelic for ‘valley of the Kinness Burn'), and those ‘gentle' elevations were an absolute bugger to try and cycle up when I was wee. They haven't gotten any easier on the old knees since, either!

Magus Muir is found on a plateau up a steady climb that eventually tops out at Drumcarrow Craig a mile or three away (somewhere I hope to walk to once I figure out a way to get there that doesn't involve narrow roads with no verges), where you can find the monument to Archbishop Sharp's assassination by Covenanters in 1679 next to a little path that roams around the woods. 

The woods themselves have changed hands in the recent past, and are now maintained by Fife Council, who updated the layout of the pathways from those I remembered as a youngling, to something making the area both easily accessible, and less spooky.

Although whether the woods were really spooky, or just made so in our imaginations by means of ghost stories, I can't say, but it doesn't help matters that just outside the tree line to the west lies the final resting place of five Covenanters who were executed to teach a lesson to other religious dissenters. That they weren't  Archbishop Sharp's actual murderers adds something eerily poignant to their grave site.

The woods are on the whole a pleasant place to wander around. I'd reckon the square-footage of the grounds is roughly the same as Sorghvliet park in Den Haag (if you allow yourself more wandering along the old, more overgrown pathways that can still be found to the north side of the woods), and as it takes roughly the same time to walk to Magus as it does to Sorghvliet, I've allowed myself to call it my surrogate.

There won't be any bluebells here come Spring, though, but that's okay, as I've found somewhere else that looks very promising indeed...

(tbc)