A Littleferry Alternative

With today dawning fine but with rather too much of a chill westerly, in the normal way we might have been planning to hop into the car and drive to Littleferry for a brisk walk but, having no car now, and not having had time to organise other ways of getting there, we had to content ourselves with our usual walks from the house.

Not that Littleferry was entirely forgotten for one of the first butterflies to cost my path was this small heath, a butterfly we don't normally see here but which is common at Littleferry.

A number of other butterflies were on the wing, including red admirals and this very smart painted lady, in considerable contrast to the painted ladies we've been seeing recently which have been very moth-eaten. I assume that this is the last generation of their great migration north from lands around the Mediterranean.

There were other pleasures too. The tracks around us aren't a favourite place of devil's-bit scabious but there was a large patch of it growing along the banks of a small burn, with plenty of flies and bees in attendance. The only thing missing were some of this plant's varieties - while flowers and pink.

Littleferry has fine views but this one, from the top of the track that leads to the hut circle, is equally good illustrating, as it does, the depopulation of the countryside following the clearances and the consolidation of land into croft holdings which, in due course, also largely failed..

A Sunny Sunday

The day started blustery, with a westerly wind which continued to harass us all day, so it was no surprise when, on our customary gentle Sunday morning walk, we saw the first swallows sitting on wires, a sign that they are contemplating a long journey south.

Sadly for our small birds, this bird won't be migrating out of their area. This is the first time we've seen the sparrowhawk hunting from the ground.

For the first time in ages we've have the sun out almost all day, though only at intervals, but this did bring out the butterflies. As well as tortoiseshells, in search of pictures we enjoyed chasing....

.....several red admirals and....

....the first peacock in some time.

All the butterflies were on the buddleias, of which we must have upwards of ten in the garden, but the butterflies' other favourite, verbena, is also out. We've noticed this before, that the butterflies aren't rally interested in the verbena until it's been out for some days.

The butterflies on parade included a couple of rather unwelcome whites, though we do have our brassicas covered with netting, and what is probably the same painted lady we've been seeing over some weeks, now looking very ragged.

So we've seen no less than five butterfly species today, a rare event.

The important thing is that we've also seen the sun. The last few days, with the constant wind and grey skies, have been very wearing. Sadly, the forecast is for the south of England to be back in a heat wave, which usually means we are back under cloud.

The Last Car

Last Sunday we drove out to Littleferry, leaving the car by the Littleferry-Golspie road while we walked through the forestry to the beach. Then, yesterday, our second daughter and I took it in to Inverness and sold it to WeBuyAnyCar for a price which I consider to have been very reasonable - and slightly more than we had expected. We returned home in a very enjoyable two-hour journey by train.

I have no intention of buying another car. I'm over eighty, I am well aware that my reactions are slowing, and I've been feeling increasingly nervous on roads like the busy A9. It's high time to stop, particularly as I can walk away from driving in the knowledge that I have never had an accident, and never claimed on our insurance policy. I wish I could feel optimistic about it but we now have to learn how to get by in a world that is increasingly dependent on the motor car.

I have owned, along with Mrs MW, a total of sixteen cars, starting with my Land Rover in which a friend and I travelled into the Sahara as far as Colomb Bechar, and ending with our last car, sold yesterday, a very different VW Polo 1.4 automatic. In between, we've owned a Morris 1000, a VW Beetle, a Morris 1200 and an Austin 1300GT, a Morris Marina - the worst car I ever bought - two Minis, a Triumph Toledo, two Ford Escort estates, a Volvo 240 estate, a VW Transporter, a Freelander, a Hyundai i10, and the VW Polo.

I enjoyed driving almost all of them, the main exception being the Marina, but feel no nostalgia for the open road. 

Yet More Damp, Cold Days

 We've had very little in the way of sunny blue skies in the last few days, with temperatures struggling to reach 15C - we've even seen one day with the midday temperature a measly 13.5C - and cold, almost wintery northeasterly and northwesterly winds. However, even if it's only for a few moments, if the sun comes out so do the butterflies, though in desperately small numbers for the time of year. Yesterday we saw only two red admirals, a tortoiseshell and a white. What's so frustrating is that one of their favourite plants, the buddleia, is in exuberant bloom.

The damp weather does however, suit the fungi, which are beginning to 'flower' in the pine woodlands behind our house. Mostly it's old favourites like this brittlegill but we've also seen some rather strange new ones, like....

....this one, which may be a puffball which has popped.

We're also seeing some old friends putting in an appearance. This one is about 18" high and closely resembles a pile of variously-shaped fresh bread rolls. Its identity escapes me but I remember it appearing in exactly the same spot this time last year.

Unless the weather makes a drastic change, this is going to be the coolest, dampest, greyest 'summer' we've experienced in our seven years on the east coast.

The Advice

I wonder what I would have suggested if this eight-year old had asked me for one bit of advice which would help him navigate the decades he was to live.

The photo was taken in a studio in Mombasa in 1953, and it was to go into his new passport. Previously, he hadn't had a passport even though he travelled widely both within East Africa and on the routes from Mombasa to England. He hadn't needed one: as a minor, he was included on both his mother and father's passports.

Some of the most difficult years of his life came immediately after that visit to the studio, for the separate passport had been needed so he could travel back and forth to England alone, this necessitated after his parents had decided to sent him to school in England, returning to his East African home for two months each (English) summer. This regime would continue until he was sixteen, after which his parents retired from East Africa and his holidays were centred on wherever they were living in England.

So, what advice would I have given myself? Perhaps it should have been something simple, like "Never tell a lie," because it has always seemed to me that lies are too often uncovered, at great cost. Yet something like that seems far too simple to be of much use.  I think I would rather have urged the small boy to be true to himself, that is, to trust, in all the complex decisions in the life that stretched before him, in the small voice that is within all of us, the voice of, at the same time, one's conscience, one's gut instinct, one's guide.

Wildlife Visitors

It's always good to see the local wildlfie when we go out on our daily walk but there's something even more special about the wildlife coming to us. This is our current resident rabbit who, while it has done some damage to our garden flowers - the pansies have suffered the most - is generally very good at sticking to the things that need mowing, like the grass and the white clover.

It's becoming increasingly tame, running away less and less fast when we bump into it in the garden. It has now reached the point where it cheerfully raids the small birds' food.

Another fairly regular visitor to the garden is the female sparrowhawk which spoils the small birds' day by perching on the fence overlooking their feeders. Every now and again we come across a pathetic pile of feathers, the price we and the sad small bird pay for the wonder of having this splendid visitor.

If the female sparrowhawk is a fairly frequent visitor....

....we see the male more infrequently. This picture was taken from the kitchen window this morning: just to be horrible, the hawk is standing underneath the three peanut feeders.

We are fortunate to live in a house with a sitting room which has a large expanse of glass overlooking the back garden so we can sit and sip our drinks while we watch the wildlife come and go.

Autumn Gentians

One of the plants which is coming in to flower in discrete colonies on the grassland of the Littleferry links is the....

....autumn gentian. It's a plant which, ever since we first found it in 2020, seems to be having a hard time. In some years hardly any of them actually flowered but this year they seem to be having a little more success.

The local gentians come in two colours. The above picture shows the white variety which seems to be prevalent at Littleferry, while the purple variety is less common. The fact that the white variety has....

....purplish outer petals has led me to think that this is the purple variety: it isn't.

While the bell heather - the darker one in this picture - is already beginning to die back the lighter-coloured ling is coming in to its own.

With so many flowers in bloom and some bright sunshine while we were there this morning, there were - for. welcome change - a good number of butterflies on the wing, including this small copper, plenty of common blues, and perhaps even more small heaths, but what we noticed was that there was, for whatever reason, a total absence of larger butterflies.