Embo

October in the northern Highlands is the month of chill breezes, of sudden showers and pellucid sunlight which, together, make it the month of rainbows. It's the month when, as happened the night before last, there's the first sharp frost, dragging the mercury down to 2C, low enough to tell the grass on our lawn that it's time to stop growing.

This was the view this morning from from the little village of Embo across the mouth of Loch Fleet north towards Golspie. Embo is more static caravan park than houses, the mobile homes....

....lining the shore and extending well back from the beach at the southern end. On a busy summer week the residents, some 300 in all, must be outnumbered by the visitors, perhaps several times over in high season. To service this influx, there's a NISA supermarket, a restaurant, a cafe, and a mobile post office which comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. For entertainment there's a very neat playpark for the kids and the beach, miles of beach, some of it with exposed sandstones which have been eroded to form small rock pools, but mostly it's sand. I complain about the Golspie beach being deserted of its wildlife but Embo's is just as bad.

I do wonder how the holidaymakers pass their time, for the attractions of a beach like this must wear thin, at least for the adults: most children seem happy to spend hours on a good, sandy beach, almost whatever the weather. Perhaps the main attraction of Embo is that it's near more interesting places, like Loch Fleet, Dunrobin Castle and the distillery at Glenmorangie.