Exploring

Since I'm walking the dog twice a day now, I decided that I needed to add variety to stop me from getting bored. So, today I drove over to Polton, and explored some more of the area between there and Lasswade. It was warm and muggy, so it was nice to bump into a Harrier who emerged from what I'd thought would be a shady footpath and confirmed that it would go where I was heading. This took me to Lasswade Old Kirk (see extra) and, from there I'd hoped to come back on the other side of the Esk, but discovered that one cannot walk along the old railway viaduct heading out of Lasswade. However, the big U-turn allowed me to re-take a couple of Turf zones that I'd taken earlier, only for Aibo to take take off me. One of these was at Mavisbank House where, now that the sun had broken through, one of the wings was attractively lit (see extra). Then I returned to the car, only to meet TopFlat as he emerged from taking a zone that I'd wanted to re-take. We chatted for a few minutes, and the wait for his block time to expire gave me the chance to explore the area where Springfield Mill used to stand, and is now a nature reserve. However, when driving back, I had to stop off at the amazing field of poppies that I spotted two days ago when we drove to Lasswade to eat.