On Sunday,
we decided to climb Arthur’s Seat, which is a hill/mountain thing that looks
over Edinburgh. It is immense, and we only ended up climbing the lower hill; we
decided not to attempt the larger peak since it looked too foreboding for us. The
lower hill still offered incredible views of Edinburgh, and it was
awe-inspiring. It reminded me of all the hikes and camping trips I had taken
with my family over the years, and I couldn’t help but think that if my family
was here, my dad would drag us up there and be overly enthusiastic about it,
and my sisters and I would be less enthusiastic until we reached the top. In
fact, that was almost how it worked. There was a group of us who took one look
at the hill and we thought that there was no way we could make it up to the top
of that. We even played with the idea of stopping halfway up and just turning
around if we thought it would be too difficult to get to the top of it.
Instead, we pushed on, and we made it to the top.
We had read
that the hill was called Arthur’s Seat because there was a legend that King
Arthur built a castle on the hill. It is not hard to imagine, since the hill is
in prime fortress territory, and it has a great view of the city. It also felt
rather magical standing on top of the hill and looking out over all of
Edinburgh. It was easy to see how people could assign mystical properties to
such a place. I even found myself assigning mystical elements to Arthur’s Seat,
merely because of the merging of the cliff, the view, and the gale force winds
that threatened to topple us. There is so much history that this hill has
witnessed over millions of years, and we were only a small sliver of that
history, which was incredibly humbling to think about. Arthur’s Seat has definitely
captured many people’s imaginations, including my own.
