Another damp, wintery day here today, with the wind firmly in the north, the temperature struggling to climb above 10C and occasional cold showers to keep us cheerful. Not that any of this is an excuse for us to shirk our daily walk, this time along the shore by Dunrobin Castle and in its woods where....
....we found an impressive fungus growing on a rotten stump. The biggest of the fruiting bodies was almost....
....a foot across - we're being encouraged to return to the good old imperial measurements, aren't we? - and beautifully patterned. Identifying fungi is always a lottery but the pattern and the....
....pores on the underside suggest it may be Polyporus squamosus, Dryad's Saddle.
As if that wasn't a sufficiently exciting discovery to cheer a dull day, we had the additional joy of finding, along the exit road from the castle car park and just outside the strip they'd recently mown, the year's first....
The discovery of the first orchid is always one of the turning points of the year, signposting that we are, whatever the weather may suggest, at last moving towards summer.
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