Swans and Cygnets on Pond

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 3 Jul 2022

This pond lies at the West end of the grandly named Alba Campus on the edge of Livingston. The Alba Campus (sometimes just referred to as the Alba Business Centre) is basically an upmarket business park - with an emphasis on pharmacological research facilities - built on former farmland, which is a bit over 20 years old and has lots of still fairly impressive-looking big buildings, though some of the wooden-clad exteriors of smaller units at this end of the estate are starting to fade and show their age. From what I can gather swan eggs usually hatch around the start of June, so these four orderly cygnets are probably around a month old. Approaching the pond from the East, its size isn't immediately apparent; the channel in between the two sections gives the impression of being a just out of sight shore. There is a dead-end path leading to a small bench just East of here, but to do a civilized circuit around the pond a bit of walking through car parks and on roads is required. The pond oddly doesn't appear on older maps - up until the 1960s anyway - so it may have been created as part of the development's landscaping, in order to attract upmarket clients. Not a bad thing at all.

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