Denmark is weirdly flat, not quite the Netherlands flat but flat enough that there are points where I have stood on this island (Funen) maybe 10km inland and watched as a thunderstorm sweeps in from the sea with no barriers in its way. The highest point in Denmark is 171m! I am sure I have had piles of garden rubbish back home that could more or less have rivalled that!
As a Scottish person who has been up the odd Munro, I thought I would pine most for the hills and the mountains of home, and I do sometimes. I miss those spongey-looking mountains you get in Scotland where there isn't a tree in sight, just the odd white crumb, that on closer inspection turns out to be a sheep on the hillside. Obviously Alpine mountains look much more spectacular and I marvel at them every time I fly over them to visit my in-laws in Tuscany, but they aren't my home countryside.
Interestingly though, I am beginning to realise that there is something I miss just as much, if not more than the hills from home, but that I hadn't pre-empted: waterfalls. When a country is flat or flattish, there are almost no waterfalls. I was brought up in Newton Mearns so the nearest park, where I went all the time as a child and then with my own kids had this beautiful waterfall. Nearby Linn park also had a beautiful waterfall, unsurprisingly given linn means waterfall! Almost every park I knew in the vicinity of Glasgow had a waterfall, almost every walk I ever went on in nature involved a waterfall.
I loved to photograph waterfalls and to watch them, but even more than that I loved to stand and listen to the power of the water, to marvel at its endlessness, and that is something I took for granted.
When mum was still alive, I used to hire a car when I went to Scotland so could visit all my old haunts and friends but now I tend to stay with my brother in Glasgow in a paid parking zone, I can't. I guess I'm going to have to find myself a public transport waterfall trail for future visits, just to give me my annual dose!
