New, Different, or just Beautiful

To me every walk offers an opportunity to find something new or different or just beautiful, and this is best time of year as so much here is exploding into its short summer life.  So today we walked the lower slopes of Beinn Bhraggie woods, along paths shared with mountain cyclists and giant thistles, some over two metres tall.

This is Britain's tallest thistle species, the marsh thistle.

I remember yellow pimpernels from last year in the same place but not in these numbers and, while....

 ....chickweed wintergreen - also called arctic starflower - is a new discovery this year, they too are out in large numbers.

We increased the number of orchid sites today by one, but with a site with only three of these northern marsh orchids visible. It's along the path at the back of Golspie Tower's houses.

I keep telling myself not to photograph fungi as they give me heartache when I can't identify them. This beauty is, as best I can tell, one of the boletes, possibly the orange birch bolete, growing in solitary splendour near the orchids.

Butterflies have been conspicuous by their absence this year, which isn't surprising as the days remain cool and the night temperatures drop to 8C, so I chased this one across the heather to capture its portrait. This has led to the usual agonies of identification. It's a fritillary, but I think it's a high brown, which are supposed to be unusual. They've been in steep decline since the 70s but this isn't the first we've seen here, so perhaps we are exceptional in having a healthy population.