Backies Walk

We walked up to Backies this morning on a cold day of alternating brilliant sunshine and blustery winter showers. Backies is a crofting township on the opposite side the Golspie Burn from Golspie Tower so it's most easily reached by walking up the burn's glen through the woodland and then climbing....

....through Dunrobin woods, with their ancient, moss-covered walls, to the....

....township's fields. Many of the croft houses, which date back to the early decades of the nineteenth century and which were built by those cleared from the townships selected to become sheep walks (farms), have been brought up-to-date as pleasant dwellings with fine views. However, some are derelict, monuments to those who built them yet couldn't survive on the meagre produce of the few acres that were allocated to each croft. Happily, a few of the crofts are still worked, with the descendants of the sheep which evicted so many people to be seen in some of the fields.

As well as in the houses themselves, the scale of the work undertaken by those early crofters can be seen in some of the boundary walls. The flat rock to the right of this picture must weigh several tons yet it was worked into an upright position.

From the furthest point of our walk we looked south, across some of the modern farm buildings of Dunrobin Mains - the castle's home farm - to Golspie itself, and beyond to the south beach and Loch Fleet. The sun was bright but a few moments later snow began to fall, not in flakes but in little pellets, rather like small grains of bouncy rice.