Edinburgh, Scotland
Thanks to my failure to dress appropriately for a hike, Josh and I helped save a little girl’s life. Arthur’s Seat is the highest peak in Edinburgh (which, by the way, is full of hills). Visiting this mini mountain was at the top of Josh’s to-do list so I attempted to be a good sport when he suggested we abandon our group and morning plans to climb it.
There are various hiking trails that lead to the top and Josh assured me it was a simple 30-minutes walk on a slightly inclined path to the top. That’s why I agreed to go ahead and go while we were in the area this morning when the fog was low and the sun was out – even though I had dressed for a day of museum hopping in the city.
At first the walk was exactly as Josh described and really beautiful. We passed some ruins from a former Abbey that overlooked a lake and the hills along the path were covered in yellow and orange wildflowers. Once you made it past the first few hills and the Abbey, the path turned much more intense. It was filled with uneven rocks, really narrow sections with steep drops. There were lots of mosquitos and the people around us were dressed more and more for legit athletics and not a relaxing stroll.
We were on a real hike and I was in dressy pants, flats and jewelry. I kept stumbling on the rocks and – well, it is irrelevant whether I quit first or we saw the girl first – the important thing is that we saw a little girl sitting on one of the rocky cliffs.
She was up there on a 30-foot high rock formation – alone! We noticed her after we walked up on a another couple who had stopped on the path and were starring at her. The ledge was such that none of us could see if she had an adult standing below the cliff. We mumbled about what parent let’s their kid climb something that dangerous and how there was no way her mom or dad wasn’t there below her, out of sight.
When she started trying to climb down the face of the rock and no one stopped her, it was clear that she was, in fact, on this cliff alone and no one was watching her. Josh and I, the couple next to us and two french guys who were approaching from the other direction all started running up the hill and yelling for her to STOP. Unfortunately, I think this probably scared her more.
She kept trying to climb and stumbled on the rocks. She started sliding down the face of cliff and eventually fell. We couldn’t see how far until we reached the top of the really steep hill off the trail. Thankfully, the cliff jutted out at the bottom and it looked like she had slid most of the way and only fell the last 5 or 6 feet to the ground below.
She was hysterical and curled in a little ball with her hands covering her face. I sat on the ground with her and tried to console her. She appeared to be about 6 and as if she had some special needs. Even after she calmed down and it seemed she didn’t have any serious injuries – she wouldn’t uncurl or talk.
Her shirt had writing and it was in English.
We tried speaking in English and French and she was unresponsive and just cried more. She wasn’t wearing any shoes. The other couple and Josh looked around the cliff area for parents. The French men called the police, who could not get the concept that we were not near any road signs but on the hiking trail with a lost, shoeless, child who had just fallen off a cliff.
We were with her about 30 minutes trying to coax out a name and asking if anything hurt with no luck. Finally a woman shouted from another path, really, far away asking if there was a little girl there (she must have seen the group of people all congregating off the path from the hill she was on). Someone shouted back and she made her way up the cliff. We made sure the mom knew where she had fallen from and the French guys let the police know not to send anyone. The little girl still didn’t talk even when her mom grabbed her. No one really seemed clear on how she had slipped away but she had wondered a long way from where her mom was and is really lucky to be alive.
After our failed attempt at climbing the peak, we visited the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. One of the employees saw me looking at a royal family succession chart and took the time to explain a brief history of the United Kingdom to me. It really made the visit lots more enjoyable, knowing who was married to whom and where all the kids belonged in history.
After that we coincidentally ran into to half of our group out and about on their way to Edinburgh Castle – so we joined in. The castle sits atop an extinct volcano called Castle Rock. The location has been used for a royal castle since the 12th century. It is said to be the most besieged palace in Great Britain. The views from the top of the castle were pretty stunning, though we apparently missed several exhibits while we visited, as the compound was pretty hard to navigate.
At the base of the castle is the Scottish Whiskey Experience which houses one if the biggest scotch collections in the world. Josh and I went for the full tour which involved a Disney-haunted-house-style ride through the facility in whiskey barrel cars along a track while CGI videos and holograms played. The ride even involed wiffs of air scented like toasted barley and peat. There was a scratch-and-sniff card game where we tried to match the whiskey notes to the region of Scotland it came from, several videos and we learned how to do a proper whiskey tasting.
We also got to view the huge scotch collection, which started with five rare selections and grew to thousands of unopened bottles of scotch. Many of the bottles in the collection were missing liquid and one was completely empty despite never being opened. Though science can now explain the evaporation process, this disappearing scotch used to be known as the “Angel’s Share” – implying that the angels drank the missing scotch from the barrels and sealed bottles.
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