A Slow Spring

George - that's the first duke of Sutherland to those who are not well-connected - watched us as we walked the tracks in the woods below Beinn Bhuidhe this morning, one of which....

....passes the spot where the stone for his plinth was quarried. It's a handsome red to red-brown sandstone which is a fine freestone - that is, it cleaves easily into rectangular blocks - which often shows structures, such as rippled marks, formed by the running water which laid the sands down back in Devonian times over 350 million years ago.

The higher woods remain unusually silent, the only bird species which is normally active being....

....the willow warbler, of which there seems to be one singing from a vantage point every hundred metres or so. We heard a few chiff-chaffs at Strathpeffer the other day, but they aren't singing here.

So far we've seen peacocks and tortoiseshells on the wing but today it was good to find a third species, the speckled brown. It was where one always finds this pretty butterfly, in a sunny clearing in the woods, but often there are several of them flying around each other.

After a cold winter it's a slow spring coming: the weather forecaster on the radio this morning suggested that this was going to be the coldest April for sixty years.