Dismal Weather

Getting some exercise safely in midwinter is a struggle for anyone of our vintage. Yesterday I walked the forest track which runs up from our house to find any standing water - and there's a fair amount of it from the recent thaw - frozen into solid black ice.

This corner would have made an excellent ice rink but the only way for a pedestrian to get past it was to follow the tyre track in the centre of the picture.

Today, wanting to really stretch our legs after the weather confinements of recent days, we drove out to Littleferry, stopping briefly at the Golspie seafront to admire the waves, brought in by a stiff east-southeasterly, pounding against what is already a wrecked promenade breakwater. According to the forecast, this wind will rise from twenty miles an hour to gale force from around 5pm today, and will then blow steadily from that direction until Friday.

The road out to Liitteferry has been closed by snowdrifts for much of the time since New Year but was clear this morning. However, any hope of a good walk along the beach was dashed by the biting wind which blew into our teeth. We struggled out to the main beach to....

....be awed by the raw power of the surf breaking on the beach, then allowed the wind to blow us back....

....through the village to the main pool of Loch Fleet.

Here, usually, we'll see plenty of ducks, crows, gulls, oystercatchers, curlews and other shore birds, and a large colony of seals, but all we saw was a couple of diving ducks, a handful of gulls, and what may have been a pair of eider.

So we had our walk but arrived home depressed by the greyness of the scenery, the miserableness of the weather, and the scarcity of wildlife.