Colinton Tunnel

I know this is almost exclusively a sewing blog these days, but I’ve decided to go back to an old school ‘here’s what we did’ type post. We decided not to go away during the February school holidays, and do day trips and relaxing instead. A bit more relaxing than at first expected on account of the awful weather. But we did get a couple of nice days, and on one of those we went to the Colinton Tunnel.

We’d only been there once before, when Ellius was quite little. It’s on the Water of Leith Walkway, so it’s theoretically accessible by bike, but since it had rained heavily the day before we droive. There is a small car park very near the actual tunnel but we parked in the residential streets at the top of Colinton and walked down through the village, which is a nice walk and you pass various information plaques about Robert Louis Stevenson who was from there.

Speaking of Robert Louis Stevenson, the whole tunnel is themed after one of his poems. I hadn’t fully appreciated that, but Milo literally just learnt it at school, and I learnt it off by heart as well in the process. The Poem is ‘From a Railway Carriage’

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!

We walked along quite a bit after the tunnel, until we got to the paved bit of the water of Leith Path, and eventually met the Union Canal. We’re planning on coming back in the summer when it’s not muddy, and now we know where to turn of the canal path.