The Town Walk

When the weather turns filthy, and now that we no longer trek into the hills whatever it's throwing at us, we have a town walk which is a healthy two miles long. We start at our local Spar store, where the young lady who owns it puts our paper out in a box each morning so we don't have to go in to the shop. We then walk along what is appropriately called Back Road, which runs along the back of the village, cross the A9 (above), and....

....follow the road round to the coast, coming out just to the south of the harbour arm. The walk then takes us the full length of Golspie's 'promenade' but, if the tide allows, we veer off onto....

....the beach that fronts the main part of the town. It it's deserted it's quite good for birds - we saw redshank, oystercatcher, curlew and cormorant today. At the far end of the beach we return to the promenade which takes us round to....

....the point where the Golspie Burn, swollen today with whisky-brown water - meets the sea. A small group of mallard live there and make it very clear each time we pass that we are expected to bring a few crusts of bread with us.

The last part of the walk follows the burn, before we cut back to the A9, cross it, and climb the small hill to our house.

Wherever we walk in Golspie, George stares down at us from his plinth on top of Beinn Bhraggie. It must be pretty miserable for him up there today.