Golspie's Townships 1

Today's OS map of the area largely covered by Golspie parish shows a landscape of woodland, open moor and farm fields, the fields clustered around large farm steadings. The only urban area is Golspie itself, a small town which likes to call itself a village.

One of the pleasures of arriving in a new area is the gradual understanding of the history lying hidden under this modern cover. In the Golspie area human occupation goes back thousands of years - the village's name may derive from the Norse for 'gully village', presumably referring to the Golspie glen - but so far I have only stripped back the layers to see the human landscape which existed in the times before early 19th century and the reorganisation of the crop lands into the large farms, a process known as the clearances, in which....

....thirty-three small townships, each with five or more families, were emptied to create the new, 'improved' farms and the town of Golspie.

The change seems to have come in two stages. The above map, part of the extensive survey of the Highlands carried out by William Roy in the years following the Jacobite rebellion, courtesy National Library of Scotland, shows fields around each community organised in a random fashion, suggesting that they were worked by traditional runrig methods. Within the short space of less than twenty years, much of this was to change.

Golspie's Climate

When we decided to move to Golspie its climate (graph above) wasn't a matter of too much concern. We were aware that it would be....

....wetter than Felixstowe, above, which it is, with an annual precipitation of 734mm to Felixstowe's 560mm, and colder - its mean annual temperature is 2 degrees lower, less because of cold winters than because of cool summers, but neither of these are significant. In fact, we've been surprised at how temperate the climate here has, so far, turned out to be, mainly because it lies in the lee of the Highlands.

Golspie is very different from our previous home in....

.... Kilchoan, above, where the main impact was the amount of rain the place enjoyed, a hefty 1,723mm annually. We can recall weeks, not necessarily in winter, when we hardly saw the sun and endured an almost continuous diet of what was called 'Kilchoan sunshine'.

This was brought to mind because today, by the standards to which we are becoming accustomed, was a wet day in Golspie, yet we managed to walk this afternoon along the beach without returning to the house soaked.

The highlight of our walk was a few minutes spent watching this redshank which had allowed us to approach remarkably close. Redshanks are very pretty little birds which bob up and down when they're worried, and then fly off with a plaintive call, as if scolding the intruder: "Really, shame on you, you shouldn't have disturbed me!"

Another Dunrobin Walk

Dunrobin Castle, which stands a mile beyond the Golspie Burn to the northeast of the village, is surrounded by deciduous woodland through which runs a network of public paths.

Today we walked in the area to the west of the castle, crossing the drive that leads up to its front entrance from the A9. The castle is closed to the public at this time of year but in the season this carpark is busy with cars and coaches. As well as being a stately home it also has a well-regarded museum containing much of the history of the Sutherland dynasty and some fine exhibits, such as Pictish standing stones collected from the local area.

The woods are silent at this time of year with remarkably little bird and animal life but there's plenty to see. This moss-encrusted log was host to a startlingly bright red fungus, possibly Sarcoscypha austriaca, the scarlet elfcup.

From this pile of feathers it was evident that a wood pigeon had been murdered recently, which is a good sign as we have seen worryingly few raptors since we came here. Today's brief sighting of a buzzard is only our second raptor, the first being of a small, unidentified one down by the golf course. These feathers suggest there is something like a peregrine in the area.

A few hundred yards beyond the castle is a small private cemetery with what looked like a recently dug grave covered in flowers. The late Countess of Sutherland, the 24th holder of a peerage created in 1235, died in London on 9 December, 2019 at the age of 98. While her funeral was at Dornoch cathedral it isn't clear whether she was buried there or here at the castle.

 The woodland walks end at this style from where we descended to the sea to join....

....the old coast road which runs back to Golspie, passing close beneath the castle. A statue of the first Duke of Sutherland, who was so involved in the clearances on Sutherland lands in the early 19th century, dominates the summit of Ben Bhraggie.

The Open Beach

Now that the tides are low around midday it seems almost automatic that our daily walk is taken along the beach even when, as happened yesterday, we intended only a short stroll around the town. There is something infinitely soothing about an open beach, with only the bubble and suck of the waves and the cry of the seabirds for company - in almost three hours wandering this morning we saw only four other people, and none of them seemed inclined to talk.

Nor does there seem any desperate need to find anything interesting along the sands, though it is good when we spot something, like this little shell, what the English call a winkle and the Scots a 'whelk' or 'wilk', Littorina littorina, which used to turn up in their thousands from the kelp beds along Ardnamurchan's shores, yet this is the first we have found here.

That said, it's always good when an unusual object does catch our eye, something we can't explain, like this calcerous growth around a pebble. We've seen something similar before, a hard white, but sometimes pink crust around the edges of shallow rock pools, but how the material accumulates around a pebble is a mystery.

The seabirds give us endless pleasure. In the past, curlews have always seemed an unfriendly bird but the local ones allow us to approach, as do....

....the friendly oystercatchers and sanderlings, feeding together in groups of up to fifty along the tideline.

We try as far as possible not to disturb them, though if we do they fly out to sea and turn quickly to settle back onto the beach. They and the redshanks seem to be the main winter residents and it will be interesting to see which species replaces the sanderlings when they fly north as winter leaves us.

Even though it is two weeks since the solstice, the days remain very dark. This picture was taken shortly before midday with the sun still behind the same strip of grey cloud where it was sitting when we set out at ten. Only once in today's walk did the skies brighten, and then only for a few minutes, when we imagined what this beach would be like if the sky was blue and the temperature twenty degrees higher.

Rainbow Showers

This morning we walked south from Golspie along the sands as the tide fell, battling against a stiff southwesterly wind which brought bands of sharp showers, but the sun kept finding the gap under the clouds to....

....burn rainbows across the skies behind us.

Seventy-five

I am seventy-five today. There was a time when seventy-five would have seemed ancient but the NHS, heeding good advice on nutrition and other lifestyle options, still finding a few adventures, and being a bit wicked in enjoying some treats, like alcohol, which we are told may not be good for us, have enabled my generation to remain healthy beyond our years. We are very fortunate.

One thing Gill and I have worked hard on is our physical fitness. We walk every day, whatever the weather, a minimum of a mile or so. Today, in search of a lochan, we walked 6.8 miles and over 350m up and down hill.

The plan had been to do a much shorter circular walk through the Ben Bhraggie forestry but the memory that, somewhere above the forestry fence, there was a lochan which needed visiting, took us though this gate....

....and out onto the glorious open-ness of Scotland's hills.

I could have cheated and found the lochan's location on my mobile but instead we just followed the sign to "Glenview Point"....

....walking steadily higher and higher on a rough track until it ended abruptly at....

....a sign which, in case we didn't appreciate it, informed us that what lay in front of us was a view.

It was a good view, a typical Scottish Highland view on a dreich day with a cutting wind and wet rain, a view which lacked a lochan but a view which, we quickly realised....

....could be improved considerably by leaving the track and walking a further fifty metres up to the hill's summit - but from which we still couldn't see the lochan.

Never mind, the lochan will still be there another day, which can't be said for the bottle of St Emilion we have warming by the hob.

Welcome 2020

Very good wishes for 2020

Golspie Rowing Club's two skiffs, Ben Bhraggie and Silver Rock, take to sea

on the last evening of 2019.