A Thaw Sets In

We woke to "red clouds in the morning", a shepherd's warning, perhaps, that today would be another difficult one, though we already knew, from being woken twice during the night to the sound of snow sliding off our roof, that a thaw had started.

As soon as we were up and about we could hear the sound of breakers, visible in the above photo between the rooftops and the horizon, the sea breaking across sandbars formed by the recent onshore winds. These remove the sand from the beach between Golspie and Littleferry and deposit it a few hundred metres out to sea.

Despite some horribly slushy, slippery conditions we managed a walk up into the forestry, going extremely slowly and carefully and supporting ourselves with walking poles. From the track we could again both see and hear the breakers on the offshore sandbars.

We found some signs of our local wildlife, though not as many as we'd like to have done. This is one of the few sets of rabbit prints while....

....these are probably a roe deer.

It may be midwinter, the air temperature may be 3C, we may have just had 18" of snow, but none of these deter some of the gorse bushes from being in flower. At a very rough guess, about 5 - 10% of the gorse is  in flower, so there must be some sort of advantage in flowering through the depth of winter - though I can't imagine what it is.