Littleferry

Littleferry was at its best this morning, with a warm but fairly determined southerly blowing and sunshine chasing cloud shadows across the landscape.

The eider were there in even larger numbers than a week ago, mostly young birds with some beginning to show their adult plumage. These ones were swimming against the incoming tide-race at the entrance to Loch Fleet, at its fastest when we arrived as it was mid-point between low and high water.

Every visit to Littleferry produces a highlight, and today's was the discovery, in between the fading white-flowered gentians, of a pale blue gentian. The gentians are a large and varied family, but I suspect that, even though the flower isn't the normal deep purple, this is still a variety of the autumn gentian, Gentianella amarella.

As we drove back to Golspie dark clouds heaved over the inland hills to produce a low-arced rainbow across the still-exposed mudflats of Loch Fleet, reminding us that we're moving into the season when the Highlands seems to specialise in this phenomenon.