Looking Down from Nancy's Hill

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 13 Feb 2021

While I knew from the map there would be steep banks to a pond from Nancy's Hill I certainly wasn't expecting anything on this scale - near-vertical rockfaces heading down to the small fishery below. It is called Parkley Fishery and their website provided some interesting history. The nearby Parkley Place Farm sold what they describe as a rocky outcrop - on old maps it appears to be a combination of the West section of Nancy's Hill and Peat Hill [tree] Plantation - to the local council for quarrying in the 1920s. Whinstone was quarried and used for local roads and kerbs, but due to persistent flooding the quarrying was abandoned in the 1940s and for an unspecified period it was then used as a reservoir for nearby Linlithgow - it held ten million gallons of water. In the 1970s the farm bought the land back from the council and in the 1990s turned it into a fishery. Although the actual summit of Nancy's Hill is hard to pinpoint it is definitely a bit further West than the big-scale online maps put it, and it is probable that its original summit has been quarried away. Obviously measurements will be more accurate these days but maps before the quarry show a summit height of 464 feet, which is 2-3m higher than today's summit. All the white below is water, the circular 'pond' towards the top of the picture is just a hole in the ice at the West of the proper pond.

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0