Arthur's Seat

            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.