Yellow's The Colour....

To me, yellow's one of the main colours of spring, of daffodils and primroses and dandelions, while at this stage of the year, if there are flowers still in bloom, they tend to be in blues and purples. That said, it's surprising how many of the current wildflowers are yellow. like this St John's wart - though this is an invasive species rather than wild. It's mainly autumn flowering, as is....

....this. There's plenty of it along the verges of the more open forest tracks. My computer wants to identify it as flatweed, Mrs MW suggests it's coltsfoot, and I'm sitting on an uncomfortable fence. Whatever it is, it's a welcome splash of colour in a landscape which is increasingly grey.

If we're very much looking at the last of 2026's blooms, there is one shrub which rebels. I would guess that about 5% of the local gorse is coming in to flower, and will continue to flower right the way through the winter - so I'll be trying to photograph it in the snow.

I have no idea why so much of the gorse is now winter-flowering. By November, there are precious few insects on the wing, with the daytime temperatures around 8C and the overnight thermometer at 3C, so there will be even fewer as the days get progressively shorter, colder and darker.

However, it's good to think that we'll have one bright colour cheering up our winter hills.

A Cold Place

With winter heaving into view I'm reminded that I have only once been to a really cold place, and that was to Lapland in 2010, in January, where we stayed for a week. The weather was still and clear and, as you would expect of somewhere inside the Arctic Circle, cold, very cold - picture shows the house we stayed in which was, mercifully, wonderfully warm.

While we were there we did all the things that tourists are expected to do in such a place - ride in sleighs pulled by reindeer and eat reindeer meat, trek using snowshoes, and view the northern lights - they were conspicuously absent - but the best was ice fishing. This consisted of using an augur to drill a hole in the metre thick ice covering a small river, and then attracting the fish - Arctic char - with an artificial lure. As each fish was pulled out of the hole there was a sharp crackle, the sound of the poor beast being instantly frozen in a temperature of -34C.

We enjoyed the holiday immensely, particularly for the people we were with and for the stunning scenery, visible only in the short daylight hours, but I would never go back, for I found the cold crippling and the price of a dram to combat its effects depressing. 

However, I'm so glad we did the trip, for the experience and to appreciate the stubborn way humanity manages to adapt to almost impossible environment.

Lost!

It was only momentary, and it hit me as I was working my way down off this hill through a rough area of overgrown gorse and bracken, but the feeling, so vividly remembered, was one I had hoped I would never have again - that I was lost.

Thankfully, it didn't last long as I soon felt I knew where I was and that I had not, after all, left the path that would take me down to the forestry track.

The one time I was well and truly lost was while on a game-fishing trip to the south of Jamaica, a trip which my two companions, Richard and Horace, had done often enough before; and we were lost because of an error of judgement by Richard, the owner of the boat.  The story is told in an earlier blog post - here - but what I recall most out of that incident is the sense of empty, utter despair I felt.

We were fortunate, very fortunate indeed, that we managed to find our way back and we certainly didn't do any fishing that day, but it didn't put me off going out with Richard and Horace again. What I did learn was that, if I ever again had that horrible feeling that I might be lost, the best thing to do immediately would be to sit down and think - because once one has identified where the mistake was made, one has a chance of remedying it.

Surely the Last....?

I keep coming across plants and other wildlife which I think should long ago have disappeared into their winter quarters, like this lone devil's-bit scabious which was still flowering in the protected glen of a small burn running down off Bheinn Bhraggie; and if it was well past its time so was....

....this foxglove which was in solitary flower beside the fence of the farmer's sheep field. And if this was surprising so was....

....this frog which crossed the track close in front of me, presumably determined to reach the place where it was planning to over-winter.

However, the biggest surprise, after all the speculation as to whether the last butterfly of the year would be a red admiral or a painted lady, was finding.....

....this tortoiseshell. basking in the sunshine on the shutter of our drying room.

So the prize for the last butterfly on the wing at the end of summer 2026 goes to a tortoiseshell.

Views

One of the reasons we lasted such a short time living in Suffolk was that I missed the spectacular views of the Highlands and, while Golspie does not match the views we had from our homes in Kilchoan, it was still better than anything we found 'down south'.

It takes but twenty minutes to walk from our house to the point where I have this view, with Loch Fleet in the middle distance, and...,

....a few minutes further to be able to enjoy this. Both, however, are blemished, the upper picture by the power lines which, if you look carefully, run from right to left across the loch, the lower by two large pylons.

The impingement of pylons marching across our landscape isn't the only blemish on our views. To me, a view includes what might be called the 'aural' view, for the silence of the Highlands local to Golspie is spoiled by the sound of traffic on the A9 and the 'blah! blah! blah!' of heavy plant backing on the building sites.

So I walked up to my blemished view this morning and sat on a rock determined to enjoy it. In our Kilchoan days, when we were much younger and fitter, we could walk to numerous points on the peninsula where, other than the sounds of Nature, there was that precious commodity, utter silence.

No doubt, even if we had stayed in Kilchoan, we wouldn't have been fit enough to walk to some of the remote silent spots. Age gets us, age limits us, however hard we try to run away from it.

To The Beach

Faced with the prospect of a beautiful day today after yesterday's damp misery, we decided to see how we got on taking the buggy to the nearest beach, which is at the southern end of Golspie village. Since there are two of us and only one buggy, we took turns walking, which left us with plenty of energy to stretch our legs along the beach where.....

....we met many old friends from previous walks along these sands. As before, there were precious few of them, a family of six oystercatchers, a couple of gulls..., 

....a raft of upward of a hundred eider just offshore and, overhead....

....skein after skein of pink-footed geese.

We were joined on the beach by a dozen or so humans, five dogs and, just offshore....

....one of the skiffs from the Golspie Rowing Club.

As our walk came to an end we met a pied wagtail which, I would have thought, should have been heading south of here some time ago.

So we now know that we can get ourselves to the nearest beach in about twenty minutes. The next challenge is to see how long it takes to reach our favourite beach at Littleferry while leaving us enough energy to enjoy a walk there and get safely home.

Small Bird News

Over recent weeks the garden - both back and front - has been conspicuously lacking in its 'normal' contingent of small birds. This blackbird was one of only a few we've seen, and this shortage has included....

....recently common species such as chaffinches, house sparrows, dunnocks and robins, as well as less common species such a greenfinches.

The only exceptions have been the goldfinches which were absentees while the thistle seeds were available around the fields, and the tits - great, blue and coal. The goldfinches have been feeding off the sunflower kernels we put out while the tits have concentrated on the peanuts. 

Some species have been absent almost all summer, in particular the siskins which are normally to be seen feeding with the goldfinches.

We put this absenteeism down to there being plenty of food in the surrounding fields and woods, so they should be back feeding shortly. We sincerely hope so, anyway.