New Year’s day and out for a walk with Cathryn, my wife. She wanted to visit the ruined Mavisbank House near Loanhead and I wanted to pick up a few zones in the same approximate area, so we planned a 7-mile route to suit us both.
We walked through Bonnyrigg and down the Wee Brae to Lasswade, taking care to tread carefully on the icy patches still lingering after the snows of a few days ago. A steep climb through Lasswade gave us our first zone of the day, LasswadeKirk (185 points), an old parish church dating back to the 13th Century. Continuing along the aptly named Church Road, we picked off our second zone this morning, WadingBurn (170 points), oddly located at the corner of a field.
From there we next heading down through Lasswade again to follow a footpath upstream along the north bank of the River North Esk, pausing to claim MrKevock (185 points) and MavisBank (185 points) before leaving the path and walking into the grounds of Mavisbank House, now sadly in a ruinous state and requiring some considerable amount of effort to even stabilise the structure, never mind return to any degree of previous splendour. It formed a pleasant view as we enjoyed a picnic in a sunny spot to the west.
After lunch we dropped back down to the river and across to Polton, crossing the river to take PoltonMill (185 points), located on the site of Springfield Paper Mill, now long demolished. We now followed a track known locally as The Cast, a sunken road with a stream running down the middle and lots and lots of wet sticky mud. I was this way recently on my bicycle and you can read about that here. Just a few zones taken today and no further medals to add to the collection but the points totals was now at 41,300, well on the way to Rank 15 – Great Explorer.
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