On Kilbride Hill

I was going to use another photo I took up here today - one of the east corner of Holy Trinity church, looking out to the Firth of Clyde beyond - but when it came to the bit I loved this one too much to discard it. We dragged ourselves away from the Sunday papers this afternoon because, as I said at the time, this kind of day I need to walk so that I don't scream. (I should explain that at 3pm it was still grey and a tad bleak, with only a slight thinning of the cloud above Dunoon, and the service in the morning had been poorly attended and very much "Low Sunday"!). 

So we'd clambered up out of the Bishop's Glen onto the high forestry road, walked along it for a bit, and then come down the track again in bright sunlight and birdsong. We approached the church (we'd left our car there) from the south-west, and I noticed how perfectly the building sits on its sacred hill - sacred not only because, as Larkin said, "so many dead lie round" but because it's an ancient, pre-Christian sacred site with an ancient well later dedicated to St Bride. It may only be a Victorian building, but it looks timeless and somehow settled.

And if you enlarge the photo, you can see that on top of the weather vane there's a large, gleaming crow. It's real.