A Littleferry Alternative

With today dawning fine but with rather too much of a chill westerly, in the normal way we might have been planning to hop into the car and drive to Littleferry for a brisk walk but, having no car now, and not having had time to organise other ways of getting there, we had to content ourselves with our usual walks from the house.

Not that Littleferry was entirely forgotten for one of the first butterflies to cross my path was this small heath, a butterfly we don't normally see here but which is common at Littleferry.

A number of other butterflies were on the wing, including red admirals and this very smart painted lady, in considerable contrast to the painted ladies we've been seeing recently which have been very moth-eaten. I assume that this is the last generation of their great migration north from lands around the Mediterranean.

There were other pleasures too. The tracks around us aren't a favourite place of devil's-bit scabious but there was a large patch of it growing along the banks of a small burn, with plenty of flies and bees in attendance. The only things missing were some of this plant's varieties - while flowers and pink.

Littleferry has fine views but this one, from the top of the track that leads to the hut circle, is equally good illustrating, as it does, the depopulation of the countryside following the clearances and the consolidation of land into croft holdings which, in due course, also largely failed..