Penicuik Estate.

I had half an hour to spare this morning and, as I was in the area, went to Penicuik House to take a blip of the newly stabilised ruin with the intention of using this pencil effect on it. However, as spring is on the way and these trees will soon be covered in leaves, I chose this shot instead.

It's a beautiful estate and I feel that it is a privilege to have access, it is privately owned and the still standing stable block is the home of the current generation of the Clerk family. A member of a previous generation was polymath, James Clerk Maxwell. This nineteenth century physicist developed the mathematical model for the wave theory of electromagnetic radiation without which we would have no wireless communication; but perhaps his most famous idea was the devising of the concept of Maxwell's demon, a mythical being that was able to increase the energy in a closed system purely by adding information, a counter-intuitive idea that complies with the fundamental laws of physics familiar to any self-respecting scientist. He was also a notable musician, both composer and performer, a leading statistician, who developed methods for analysing truss structures (think of the Forth bridge), laid the foundations for the fields of both relativity and quantum theory and produced the first colour photograph (though he didn't realise that it shouldn't have worked).
He was generally a good egg and, according to a friend of mine, because he worked in so many different disciplines, makes the likes of Einstein, Newton and many others of that ilk look like intellectual light-weights. I'm not going to argue with that point of view.