High Summer

It's the last day of July, high summer, yet we're under the annoyingly persistent influence of a brisk, gusty northwester that makes the air temperature, currently 16C, feel much colder. It's really a day for a walk in the protection of the forestry but I wanted an open view so I climbed the hill at the back of the village with....

....its panorama of the Dornoch Firth, hoping, all the time, that it wouldn't come on to rain.

We complain that there aren't enough of these, comfortable boulders just the right size to sit on to enjoy the view, but this one was both convenient and interesting: the dark patch is a xenolith, a piece of the local rock caught up by the intrusive granitic magma as it rose into the crust, but only half melting it.

We're so fortunate to have a choice of walks like this starting from our front door, a walk upon which I saw not another soul. Nor was there much in the way of wildlife, though I spent some minutes watching....

....this bumblebee as it fought the gusts in its attempts to access the bell heather flowers.

There's been a good crop of wild raspberries on the bushes along the verges but it's noticeable that the best are over. It's like so many things - the raspberries have done well this year but they seem to be over early, and....

....it's certainly true that the thistles have done well - this is a Scottish thistle.

The Changing Season

There's plenty of wildlife to be seen on our morning walks down to the village including, today, this roe stag and, the other day, no less than....

....three of these characters, but such excitements don't stop us noticing how fast the season is moving on. It's still July yet....

....the rowan berries are red on many of the trees, as are the....

....rosehips, while many of the summer plants....

....such as the foxgloves, have largely finished flowering for the year. Some of this earliness can be put down to the long, dry summer, and particularly the warm May, which may also help explain why....

....the fungi continue to be disappointing.

However, perhaps the greatest disappointment this year has been the butterflies. So far, in my eleven 15-minute counts for the Big Butterfly Count, I've only registered eleven butterflies from three species - red admiral, peacock and tortoiseshell, though there are some whites around.

The lack of butterflies is particularly disappointing as we've worked so hard to fill the garden with the shrubs and flowers the insects love. At present, verbena and four varieties of buddleia are in exuberant flower, and the butterflies' favourite, the michaelmas daisies, should be in flower shortly.

Geology Field Trips

I spent nearly thirty years as a teacher in five secondary schools - one private boarding, one state grammar, and four state comprehensives. In all but the private boarding school I had the good fortune to be able to teach geology, my favourite subject but not one commonly offered in secondary schools.

An essential part of all the courses I taught was field experience. One way of organising these expeditions was to use a private company, such as the Field Studies Council, which offered residential trips which included all the requirements of 'A' level examinations. I only once used an FSC facility, and that was as a place to stay. In all my trips, I led them. My union didn't like teachers doing this, to the extent that they issued warnings against being responsible for a trip as a few teachers had found themselves in deep water when an accident happened, but I just couldn't imagine not being in charge. So I led geology field trips in Shropshire, North Wales, the North Yorkshire coast, and Essex - and considered myself extremely fortunate that all of them went off without any problems. In fact, the only time a head teacher called me in to his study following a parental complaint was when a mother discovered pictures of naked men amongst the photos her daughter had taken. Fortunately, the mother had a sense of humour: we had visited a beach which we'd often studied before but which had since been designated as the first in England to be nudist, and I hadn't heard the news.

I enjoyed all the trips I took but I have the happiest memories of those in the last two years of my teaching career. I had two 'A' level classes in that time and the young people who came on the trips were amongst the best students I ever taught. They worked hard - not only during the day but also into the evening. They didn't complain about the weather - and we had to go out whatever it threw at us - nor that we worked well into each evening.

The photos show (top) The Plume School's Lower Sixth class in 1996 on a day studying Studland Bay in Dorset, and (bottom) the Upper Sixth in Shropshire in 1995.

A Walk to Loch Lunndaidh

We took the long road up to Loch Lunndaidh this morning in the hope of seeing the kingfisher again. Going up to the loch is hard work: it's uphill almost all the way and today we were walking into a stiff westerly breeze. However, there was lots to see and interest us, including....

....enjoying the start of the ling flowering - which, it seems to me, is very early this year, so the hills are carpeted with ling, bell heather and cross-leaved heath.

We spent half-an-hour at the weir where we first saw the kingfisher, without any joy. The chances of seeing it are pretty remote when one considers that it has miles of the loch's banks to hunt along, and also downstream on the Culmailly burn.

However, we did see one of the things I'd been hoping to find - the first of this season's devils's-bit scabious. There were half-a-dozen or so plants in the early stages of flowering.

Conditions weren't ideal for butterflies but we saw three common blues, three whites - we were unable to identify them more closely - and a speckled wood. This is hardly a good count for a sunny day in July.

Disappointingly, and perhaps a bit worryingly, we saw no dragonflies at the loch but, on our way home, we spotted two, one an unidentified hawker but this one possibly a ruddy darter.

A Yacht

We don't often see yachts off Golspie - or, for that matter, any other vessels except our local skiff and the few local creel boats. The reasons are fairly obvious: there is no port in the Dornoch Firth to draw larger ships in, so coastal-travelling ships, large and small, with no need to come in to the firth, cross from Brora or points north straight to the point of Tarbet Ness. 

The only bigger ships we occasionally see are Scottish Marine Protection boats, ships such as those serving the offshore oil and wind platforms, those sheltering from winter storm winds, and the rare naval ships on exercise.

So it was good to wake this morning to find....

....the Big Strit anchored off Golspie, a French-registered yacht of 13m length, though I was a bit anxious for her as she was close to the shifting sand bars which parallel the coast between Golspie and the mouth of Loch Fleet.

That Adder Again!

When we lived on Ardnamurchan we saw this unusual black adder in a broken-down stone wall several times within a couple of weeks, and concluded that it had made a home there so, when, today....

....I walked up the track where I saw an adder on June 25th - see blog post here - I checked to see if it was 'at home' - and it was, in exactly the same spot as I'd last seen it. It's just visible as a dark patch in the rough grass to the right of the track, less than a metre off it.

Unfortunately, it wasn't in a good position for a picture....

....even when I'd manoeuvred myself rather gingerly round it, so I left it and continued my walk. The sun came out for a few minutes and that may be why, when I returned along the track, the snake....

....had raised the energy to change position giving me a chance to get some....

....rather better pictures of it.

I have very mixed feelings when I encounter a snake like this. I'm scared of it, so I'm wary about how close to approach it, and very careful not to do anything to provoke it. On the other hand, I am thrilled to think that this beautiful creature is one of the few in this country which is a genuine threat to us. In a way, our relationship is comparable to that of the African in his hut in Tanzania with the lions which come to visit him at night.

I'm also very conscious of the fact that any dog out for a walk along this track will almost certainly blunder into it, with what could be fatal results. Fortunately, the track is little used.

I plan now to visit 'my' snake and admire it regularly as it's less than a half-hour walk from the house.

A Dispiriting Walk

This is where one of our favourite walks - from Duke Street in Golspie along the track that passes below Dunrobin Castle - first meets the sea. Usually, in this view back towards Golspie, there are plenty of shore birds to see. This morning there was only one, a sandwich tern screeching out over the sea..

This is highly unusual as it is here that the Golspie Burn, where the local seagulls come to socialise and bathe in fresh water, meets to sea.

Happily, we were cheered up when, a little further along the coast, we spotted this collection of birds, mostly redshanks but with some oystercatchers and a couple of black-headed gulls, but they....

....weren't too keen on hanging around.

We saw little else - a ringed plover, a few more terns - so we had to content ourselves with some of the smaller things in life, including....

....an unusually dark clover flower and....

....a vole, rather mysteriously lying in the middle of the track, obviously in the last stages of dying.

Thus cheered, we had just reached the car when it started to rain.

Rain!

In a country famed for its damp weather, we've at last had some badly needed rain, with 40mm falling in one 24-hour period, though you would never know it if, as we did, you had....

....walked through the woods this morning where the soil has quickly soaked up the desperately needed water.

Some things have really struggled in the recent dry weather. A case in point is the fungi, where early indications were that we might be heading for a good year. This morning supported that, with....

....this 'posy' of fungi which I initially identified as pinewood gingertail on the basis that (a) they were found in a pinewood, and (b) they look like Mrs MW's ginger biscuits, but now admit that they're more likely to be sulphur tufts.

For some, this is miserable weather. This is one of three wood pigeons which have grown fat on the seed dropped by the small birds from their feeders. As is fairly obvious from their amorous behaviour, two of them are males and one female - and the female isn't too keen on either of her suitors.

Beach Cricket

Faced with the prospect of an open, sandy beach like this one near Golspie, our family couldn't resist....

....a game of beach cricket. While sometimes we had with us a small, child's bat we didn't need any equipment other than a few sticks or stones to form a wicket, a ball of some sort and, as in this picture, taken on an English beach, a short length of driftwood for a bat.

Ardnamurchan was a beach-cricketer's paradise, with innumerable hidden coves and miles of firm white sands. The Sanna beach on the left here was one of the best, and we....

....played on it many times, joined by good friends who had come to visit us. Note that here, appropriately for treeless Sanna, the stumps were a pile of rocks.

Sometimes, as time passed, the tide would come in, so the outfielders had to paddle around to retrieve the ball, but we only gave up when the sea encroached on the pitch.

Those were very happy days, with the sun always shining.... perhaps.

Golspie South Beach

This morning we walked from Golspie south along its 'prize-winning beach', accessible again to older citizens like ourselves now that a ramp has been built through sea defences severely damaged the winter before last. The tide was falling leaving a beach swept almost clean, the only flotsam along the tideline, other than weed, being three small moon jellyfish.

The bird life along the beach included a dozen or so oystercatchers busy probing the newly-exposed sand for their breakfast, and a ringed plover, while offshore....

....we saw a lone eider (above), a herring gull, and two gannets and a sandwich tern diving for fish.

There were as few humans along the beach. At the village end of the sands a mother and father were coming down to the beach with their young daughter and two dogs, we saw a young lady exercising her labrador, an older couple and, in the distance, a lone man.

We sat on one of the large rocks that form the main sea defences, enjoying a warm, light easterly breeze, and marvelled at how empty the beach was on a fine Saturday morning, particularly when the forecast for the rest of the weekend is for rain.

Big Butterfly Count

Our garden buddleia and verbena have joined the other plants in full flower, just in time to draw in the butterflies so we can add them to the Big Butterfly Count, which started today. Not that much happened at first, though what did was pleasing: this is a tortoiseshell, a species we haven't seen in weeks, which persisted in showing the underside of its wings until....

....it finally took pity on me and opened them.

It was joined by a peacock which, much to my disgust, spurned our carefully nurtured shrubs in favour of a lick of soil - I suppose to obtain some minerals.

Equally unhelpful was this small white which ignored the flowers and spent its time on the broccoli and pea plants.

While all the above came into the garden one species refuses, the common blue, even though there are plenty of them up the road. Not to worry, this female was a joy, not only for its colours but also because it must have been the smallest common blue I've ever seen.