The Waders of Brora Beach

Brora beach at high tide yesterday was narrow and long and sandy and, other than the occasional razor shell and broken sea potato, a little wildlifeless until....

....we reached the point where the first burn cuts across it. Clustered near its mouth sat a group of waders which....

....turned out to be a mix of ringed plovers and sanderlings. At times the two species mingled, though the sanderlings were a little antisocial, going to sleep with their heads tucked under their wings, but every now and then....

....the sanderlings woke up and scampered down the beach as a wave retreated, only to be....

....chased back up it by the next breaking wave, back to where the plovers waited disapprovingly.

Occasionally, for no apparent reason, the whole flock took to the air, flying up and down the beach and....

....out across the sea for a couple of minutes before settling back onto the sand.

Sun, Sand, Sea and Snow

The view along Brora beach today, looking north to the first snow of the winter.

Brora

Brora is the next town up the coast from Golspie, a ten-minute drive away. It's a neat little place with its older houses built in a warm local sandstone, but it has fewer services than Golspie. It's on our list as somewhere we might buy a house but the main down-side is that the hills drop back from the coast so one would have to drive to walk in them.

The town lies at the mouth of the Brora River and has a sheltered harbour, very empty at this time of year.

We visited it to spend some time wandering round the town, trying to get a feel for the place. There are things I like about it: this picture looks upstream from the harbour to the railway bridge, and shows a path that runs from the town centre to the front - all very carefully maintained to typically Scottish standards. There's a warmth about it: as we passed, people greeted us.

We've visited Brora once before, at a rather more clement time of year, and there were people surfing then. Today's temperature - I think it hit 4C towards midday - didn't put off two surfers who were doing their very best to catch one of the rather miserable sets from the shingle promontory to the south of the river mouth.

Wildlife!

We've been residents of Golspie for a week. So far, the place and its environs have more than lived up  to any expectations we may have had, and the locals seem friendly - it's not in many small towns that most of the passers-by in the street wish one the time of day and often seem very happy to engage in conversation.

With only an hour or so available for our daily walk we climbed into the forestry on the flanks of Ben Bhraggie where....

....we had our first glimpse of some serious wildlife, a small deer, possibly a roe deer, feeding in the bracken, while....

....on the way down we passed the corner of a field which teemed with rabbits.

I brought three bird feeders with me and they were installed in our small back garden as soon as we arrived but no small bird has shown any serious interest - which isn't surprising as our neighbour two doors away has a feast available for them. However, today there was a sudden change, with the first visitor a coal tit followed....

....by a blue tit on one of my patented home-made peanut feeders.

Their enterprise was watched with interest by two cock sparrows who had been unable to work out how to access my latest bird table design, but one of them, after watching the blue tit, managed....

....to get on to the peanut feeder and, shortly afterwards, hopped on to the table.

As if this wasn't enough, as dusk approached a dunnock, which had been on the ground cleaning up the seed which the others had spilt, also managed to get on to the new table.

Feeding the small birds this winter is going to punch huge holes in Gill's housekeeping budget but the idea that, after having so few birds come into our Suffolk garden, we at last have a variety to watch, thrills me.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

At the end of our last trip to Tanzania in 2012 the pilot of our BA flight to Heathrow diverted to give those on the port side of the 'plane a view of the Kibo summit of Kilimanjaro. It was both spectacular and depressing, for some of us remember what the snows of Kilimanjaro used to look like.

This picture is taken from the aptly named John Hunter's book 'African Hunter'- link to earlier post here, In those days the snow at times looked like the disembodied wings of a great angel, for the lower slopes seemed to merge into the background sky leaving the snow hanging above the game-filled plains.

The loss of the snow has been blamed on global warming but it isn't as simple as that. A recent article in New Scientist highlighted the consequences of chopping down and burning forest, be it that of the Amazon Basin or the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro, not because of the release of carbon dioxide but because trees transpire, pumping vast amounts of water into the lower atmosphere, which then falls downwind as rain or snow.

Kilimanjaro's snows have gone, and so have the great herds of game that John Hunter used to shoot. Like so many of my generation, sitting comfortably in the sunset of our years, I feel guilty about what has happened on our watch; and beg their forgiveness that we hand over to our children a much diminished inheritance.

The Ben Bhraggie Forestry

Golspie is an elongated town, squeezed between the Moray Firth and the heights of Ben Bhraggie, which is why it offers us such a wide choice of walks from our front door - seaside ones or walks up into the hills.

Today, after spending a ridiculous proportion of the morning in battle with Vodafone, who have made a mess of sending me a new SIM, and with the day as damp as we could wish it, we opted for a brief walk into the hills, into forestry which dripped with moisture.

The higher we climbed, the more the mist closed in, but it was enjoyable because every walk in this new place is an exploration and because it was wonderful to escape the lunatic pressures that our modern lifestyle imposes upon us. Perversely, it is also very good to be back in true Scottish weather.

In kinder conditions the many paths and tracks would have been shared with mountain bikers but we saw no-one. Some of the bikers' jumps are frightening - like this one where a neatly constructed sandstone ramp leads up to a precipitous drop into the woodland.

As we walked back into the town we passed under a bridge which carries the railway just in time to see the 2.47 express pass through on its two-hour journey from Golspie to Inverness. Even though it was still 'broad daylight', the camera simply couldn't cope.

A Walk Along the Seafront

As a married couple we've moved home to somewhere completely new and, in two cases, to somewhere on a different continent, a total of ten times; and each time it has taken a while to get the beginnings of a 'feel' for the new place. I write 'beginnings' yet I don't believe one ever fully understands what makes a place tick, even if one is born into it and lived in it all one's life.

Lay aside the complexities of the human interactions, even beginning to appreciate the physical characteristics of a new environment takes time. Our experience of Golspie's climate until today has been of a seaside town facing out onto a relatively benign if rather grey North Sea. Today that impression began to change when, on a morning which offered us the first sun since we arrived last Thursday, we took a stroll along the seafront.

A steady but wide-spaced swell was marching in from the east, lifting as it approached the shore to smash against the sea wall and spill across the promenade. Along this, the northeastern section, we had already noticed the more extensive sea defences and that the gates into the walled gardens behind all had flood barriers. We had already become aware of the flood risk after we ran into trouble with our house insurance when our provider, having given us a quote, subsequently discovered that our house, even though it is on the other side of the main road, is classed as in a flood zone.

The waves at the southwestern end of the seafront, along the short section beyond the harbour arm, were even fiercer, although, according to two men who were standing watching them, we had missed the heaviest seas which had occurred an hour earlier, at high tide.

In the recent past a storm, far out in the North Sea, had created these waves which had then marched perhaps hundreds of miles to this shore. They were nothing spectacular - we've seen far more impressive storm seas on Scotland's west coast - but they've given us a feel for what may be to come.

The Urge

I can't escape the need to write. It's an urge, almost an agony, one which Coleridge well described in his tale of the ancient mariner. For me, it is made worse by carrying a camera when I go for a walk, by the taking of pictures which I feel I need to share. So, forgive me, the Memory Wanderer lives on as we start a new life in this small town in Sutherland, an hour's drive to the north of Inverness.

We arrived in Golspie on Thursday and have gone through more than our fair share of the problems common when one moves into what was someone else's slightly neglected house, exacerbated by our being in a strange town with almost no contacts to help. We'll overcome them but, perversely, they have made our return to the empty spaces of Scotland even more joyous. So we're walking every day, along the beach, up into the woodland behind the town, in the knowledge that there are endless opportunities ahead of us to roam freely across this beautiful, wild land.

This afternoon, in the sort of gusty grey weather that seems normal here at this time of year, we walked south along Golspie beach, enjoying watching the bird life and....

....coming across strange tracks across the sand. These are very like turtle tracks but we don't think they visit this part of the world, let alone in this weather, so conclude that these mark the passage of a seal which was on the beach at high tide and then made its way back to the sea.

The Memory Wanderer

With our move away from the flat lands of Suffolk back to the Highlands of Scotland starting tomorrow, The Memory Wanderer's posts will stop. The blog was intended to be a way of recording some of my memories, the history of our families and something of our life in Suffolk. It's been going since June 2018 and there have been almost 500 posts.

Our move to the east coast of Sutherland will bring many changes. It may be that I decide to start a new blog, I may explore a different platform - Instagram has always appealed to me but fewer people now follow it - and I would like to go back to writing fiction, if the spirit will once again move me.

My thanks to those who have followed this blog. I have enjoyed writing it, it has encouraged me to continue taking photographs, and has given me a great deal of pleasure during a period when I have felt very unsettled.

That Lucky Snap - 4

The quality of this picture isn't good but I excuse myself for two reasons: firstly, the photo was taken through glass, from the dining room of the lodge in Namibia at which we were staying, and secondly because I was so excited I could hardly hold the camera still.

The animal which has come in the heat of the day to drink at Erongo's waterhole is a mongoose, a very unusual black mongoose.

Black isn't a particularly advantageous colour for an animal which can be active in the midday, both from the point of view of the colour's absorption of heat and from its visibility, yet the black mongoose (Galerella nigrata), a subspecies of the slender mongoose, seems to be thriving in the area.

The reason for my excitement was less in seeing a fairly unusual species but more in that I had just started to write my second published novel, which was called Black Mongoose, the cover of which subsequently featured a picture of an animal just like this one.

The mongoose didn't tarry long. I never saw another, none of the five or so photos I took were any good, and the novel was a literary flop.

That Lucky Snap - 3

This is another example of a picture taken without realising how please I would be with it. I'm no expert with a camera so the techniques of altering exposure to increase depth in a picture are beyond me. That the cliff in the foreground and the distant view are both in reasonable focus is sheer chance.

The picture was taken from the eastern slopes of Ben Hiant on Ardnamurchan, looking out over an area called The Basin. I love the picture for the clarity of the cliff and the way the water of the burn dropping over it is frozen in the moment, for the loneliness and determination of the tree clinging for life to a sheer rock face, for the contrasts in human activity on the floor of The Basin - the modern road against almost invisible ancient agricultural workings - and for a symbol of our age, the distant wind turbine.

I also like it because it illustrates an aspect of Ardnamurchan that was very dear to us: across the great area in this shot there isn't a human visible.

The Pacific Ocean

I learned the value of good classroom resources in the four years I taught Geography at Chalvedon School in Basildon, where classroom control was.... challenging. We had a policy of sharing out the work of creating worksheets and workbooks, and spent a disproportionate amount of the department's budget on filling our filing cabinets with ready-to-hand-out materials.

I enjoyed the creative side of this: collecting of suitable information, finding photos, doing the drawings, the laying out of the master sheets. It had the further advantage that, as I moved schools, I travelled with increasingly fat folders of accumulated resources.

This sketch of the structure of the Pacific basin was the culmination of this creativity. I drew it while I was teaching at my last school, The Plume School in Maldon, and it was sufficiently simple to be used with GCSE students but could also form a useful resource at A level. It was drawn in phases, starting with the eastern half and steadily growing across to the west. I used to hand out black-and-white copies to the students who, if they could do nothing else, like me enjoyed colouring it in.

It was the only piece of original geographical artwork of which I was so proud that I added in the bottom left-hand corner, using Letraset, ©JEHaylett. I kept it for years before handing it on the Rachael in the hope that, as a Geography teacher, she might be able to use it in her lessons.

The Hunter

While the golfers chase a small white ball up the fairway....

....a kingfisher watches over the still waters of the fleet.

We've seen the kingfisher a couple of times over the last few days. When we tell other people living locally they say they've never seen one. Kingfishers are difficult to find as they're very shy, flying off as soon as they spot anyone within about a hundred metres, so the golfers are constantly disturbing them. This one is obviously learning to live with them as he was active on a fine day when the fairways were busy. Long may he continue to catch fish along the fleet.

That Lucky Snap - 2

This hippo, standing on the bank of Lake Manze in Tanzania, looks amiable enough but they have enough of a reputation for me to become extremely nervous when the guide in the small outboard boat we were travelling in moved close to give his tourists a better view. I'm not often right but....

....I was in this case as, with no warning at all, and with quite amazing speed, he charged.

By some counts, hippos kill 3,000 human a year in Africa, coming third in the grisly competition of which are the most lethal of Africa's inhabitants - they are beaten by humans, while the top killer, mosquitos, kill over 400,000 annually, mostly children.

Living with a View - 5

The photo albums on my computer are filled with views, many of them breathtaking but most of them  only temporary, a scene enjoyed for a few minutes before, in our busy lives, we moved on to something else. This is an example, Dinosaur National Park in southeastern Alberta, where we only spent part of a day and which deserved so much longer.

To be special, a view doesn't have to be of things natural. This panorama is seen across the rooftops of Florence but, again, we only stayed a few minutes up the bell tower before we went in search of other quickly-savoured pleasures.

Occasionally we've fortunate enough to enjoy a view for a few days. This one is seen from a room at the small resort hotel of Lazy Lagoon to the north of Dar-es-Salaam where we stayed twice, each time for only a few days though we would love to have stayed forever.

It is, therefore, a great privilege, one for which we should be deeply thankful, to have spent some of our lives living with a view, day in and day out, watching it but never allowing familiarity to dim its wonder.

Rat!

During the almost two years we have lived in this house, and despite lavish offerings of food dispensed through a bewildering variety of bought and home-made feeders, we've had few birds come in to our garden - the occasional dunnock, a blackbird, and a rare blue tit. So it was with mixed feelings that we sat in our conservatory this lunchtime and watched a rat mimic a bird. First he/she climbed into the cotoneaster, from which....

 ....much to our amazement he/she launched herself at the bird table, managing....

 ....to get a grip on the wooden post and then fighting his/her way up under the overhang and....

....onto the table, which had just been laden with the birds' lunch.

Despite being shoed away several times, the rat kept returning. Gill was upset - she thinks rats are dirty - but I liked him/her. Our dislike of them stems from the knowledge that they are direct rivals to us, having as broad a taste in food, an enviable ability to produce hoards of children, and being almost as intelligent. That we live in a rural area, next to a field which this year had barley in it, and in which there are mounds of grain scattered from the harvest, means that this sort of wildlife is bound to take up residence.

Despite this, I did move the bird table away from the shrub....

....but I look forward to seeing the rat back, this time shinning the whole way up the bird table's post.