In early childhood many things used to puzzle me. But when Easter came around and the Easter story was told, one particular question mystified me. Not the miracles so much. After all, like most children, I was capable of believing many odd things. The real puzzle was - How come I never was able to find hills with walls going round them?
It had to be true that they normally should have walls otherwise what was so special about a green hill without one?
Blacka's Thistle Hill does have a wall partly round it but it is green. Yet on a dull, mournful morning at Easter weekend it's possible to think that certain film directors would be drawn to enact that very story here, though they would have to acknowledge that the words in the hymn are what I eventually worked them out to mean - an archaic form of 'outside'.
It's hard to know how green and treeless these slopes were when the monks and canons of Beauchief Abbey had their farmstead here many centuries ago. Nor just how old is the stone wall long since knocked down.
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