05 In the picture above we are looking south back down the fence to the cattle grid where we started by the Megget Stane. Whereas the hill we are climbing belongs to the Manor (or Tweedsmuir) Hills the hills on the other side of the valley are the Moffat Hills. That's Nickies Knowe on the left of the picture and the lower slopes of Carlavin Hill on the right. Going along the ridges of either of these hills will bring you out at Lochcraig Head above Loch Skene. So you can have a relatively easy and interesting enough walk along one ridge and back by the other with yet another 800 metres hill in the middle of your walk (Lochcraig Head).
The Talla Water runs down the valley between the two ridges and originates just west of Lochcraig Head. We are therefore looking down on the watershed between the Talla and Megget water systems. All the water to the left of this picture flows east into Megget Water and down to St Mary's Loch where it enters the River Yarrow system, while the Talla Water takes it's contents down to the right of the picture and west to the River Tweed. The River Yarrow joins the River Ettrick at Philiphaugh just west of Selkirk where for a brief spell it becomes the Ettrick. There was as covenanting battle at Philiphaugh in 1645. Just east of Selkirk the River Ettrick joins the River Tweed and continues as the Tweed to Berwick on Tweed.
In the first picture below we are still looking south to the Moffat Hills but we are now above that first little climb away from the cattle grid and onto the gentle rise all the way to the top of Broad Law.
The bottom picture shows Cloudberry in fruit. Three weeks before doing the present walk I came across a whole hillside covered in cloudberry on Glenstivon Dod while the plants were still in flower and I took them to be wild strawberries, but when you see the fruit it is really quite different from strawberry.