Above Farmland & Forestry

In the farm lands below Beinn Bhraggie we passed the silage harvest, neatly rolled and packaged into black polythene sausages, then....

....we stopped for a few minutes to watch this young fallow deer stag which had emerged from the woodlands to graze the regenerating grasslands.

On our way up through the woodland we passed rowans heavy with berries but....

....while this, at first sight, appeared to be a rowan with exceptionally bright red berries, it's not, perhaps more likely to be red elder, Sambucus racemosa,

In the conifer forestry it's increasingly the time of year for the fungi. This one, with it's massive baobab-like stem and relatively small brown cap, caught our eye. It looks like Boletus edulis, known in France as the Cep and in Britain as the Penny-bun Bolete, a very sought-after edible fungus frequently found in clearings in broad-leaved and coniferous forests.

What we really wanted to do was to get up above the farmland and the forestry onto the open hills with their now already fading blanket of ling and bell heather, where the air always seems fresher, the sun warmer, and our hearts lighter.