Eddie’s Blog

Last weekend I went walking near Broad Law in the Southern Upland hills near Edinburgh, to look for the remains of a North American Harvard aircraft that crashed here in 1953. I found the site on a ridge of Broad Law above a wood, with excellent views of the surrounding hills.

The site lies at an altitude of about 550m, 2½ km north-west of the summit of Broad Law, very close to the minor summit of Little Knock. There is a crater at the site filled with wreckage testifying to the severity of the crash, and scattered wreckage further down the hill, including a wing with landing gear.

You can see more about this site on my website here.

Last night Lesley I travelled through to the Carling Academy in Glasgow to see a double bill of Motorhead & Saxon.

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Last night I went to see the Glasgow band Mogwai at the Edinburgh Corn Exchange. Mogwai are a very strange band - they hardly ever have vocals in any of their music and seem to be willfully difficult to approach on an emotional level. I think half of their music is sublime, trippy guitar rock that manages to be both soothing and energetic, with obvious influences from My Bloody Valentine, Jesus and Mary Chain and perhaps contrastingly, Brian Eno and Moby.

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Last weekend Lesley and I travelled through to Glasgow to see Queen at the SECC. Lesley and I are both Queen fans going back a long way, and we have both been a bit fanatical about them at certain points in our lives (me during the early eighties, and her since the late eighties).

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I spent last week at Glenmore Lodge, near Aviemore on a Mountain Leader training course. This training course was the first part of the process of gaining the Mountain Leader Award qualification.

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Last weekend I went to the the Leuchars Air Show. Unfortunately the day was ruined somewhat by the weather with rain, a low cloudbase and poor visibility meaning that most of the flying displays were cancelled or curtailed.

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Last year, I ran in the Great Scottish Run 10k race in Glasgow (see the previous blog posting ‘Great Scottish Run)’ and yesterday I ran in the Great Scottish Run again, this time doing the half-marathon (which was not surprisingly more difficult). My time was about 2 hours 7 minutes - incredible to think that Haile Gebrselassie ran a full marathon in 2007 in less time than this.

Last weekend I travelled to Assynt in the far north-west of Scotland to climb the summits of Conival and Ben More Assynt and to look for the remains of an Avro Anson that crashed in the area in 1941. On the saturday evening I walked into the mountains from Inchnadamph and I had blue skies, the warmth of the setting sun and a breeze to keep the midges away.

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At the start of this month, Lesley and I went on a trip to the West Country (Bristol, Bath, Portishead and Clevedon). Then we went to Amsterdam for a few days (second visit for me, see my previous blog posting ‘Amsterdam‘). Lesley has written great blog entries about the trips here and here, so no need for me to duplicate what she has already done!

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Lesley and I spent last weekend on the island of Mull, staying in Tobermory. On the Saturday I walked up Ben More (whilst Lesley went to the island of Iona), which is the highest summit on the island, and the only munro summit that you need to catch a ferry from the Scottish mainland to visit. Unfortunately I got no views as there was humid mist and clouds from low elevations all the way to the summit. I walked up the easiest route on the north side of the mountain and it was a long, sweaty climb.

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