I’ve been meaning to write about Strathglass for a couple of years now, but have never got around to it. This post therefore merges three separate visits to the same location, marked by the little red dot in the middle of my map, above. So you’ll encounter a strange mixture of photographs from spring and autumn. Each time, we stayed in the same log cabin poised above the valley of the River Glass.

The area around the cabin has fairly frequent visitors:

There’s a large rear deck, with a view northeast along the length of the strath:

Autumn is the time to see red deer calves still in their spotted natal coats:

And the bird feeders attract interesting visitors, too. This one’s a great spotted woodpecker (the chaffinch in the background is clearly waiting his turn):

Though some, like this goldfinch, prefer to cater for themselves:

When not lounging around watching the wildlife, we wander the nearby glens.

Glen Affric is wild in its upper part, with the Allt Beithe hostel sited a good nine miles from the public road system. But the lower reaches are pleasantly domesticated, with car parks and way-marked trails. It’s a lovely spot in autumn:

(The craggy point in the distance above the line of the river is Sgurr na Lapaich, I believe.)

Our other favoured glen is Strathfarrar. Unusually in Scotland, access to this glen is protected by a locked gate—only 25 cars are allowed into the glen on any given day, and it’s closed to vehicular traffic (except, of course, for residents and estate workers) for a day and a half a week. The Boon Companion and I generally turn up on a Tuesday, when the glen is closed for the full day. We park in the little car park just short of the gate, and amble up the road beside the river for as far as the spirit moves us, largely untroubled by traffic.

In the morning, the warm tarmac tempts out the local reptiles. We’ve encountered basking common lizards here, and also this:

It’s a slow worm. Despite the name, not a worm; despite appearances, not a snake—it’s a legless lizard. Unfortunately, it departed too quickly for me to hunker down and check its eyes, which (unlike a true snake) it blinks regularly.

And, hanging around the car-park, checking out the visitors, there’s Susie the goat:

Occasionally we head east out of Cannich, but stop short of the Nessie-themed horrors of Drumnadrochit. We drive up to park near the neolithic chambered cairn at Corrimony and then walk farther up the River Enrick, though the route to Corrimony Falls seems curiously elusive.

In the spring, the lambs of Corrimony seem curiously trusting. This one came running across the field to take a look at us:

In the other direction, we head through Beauly and Muir of Ord (pausing at the Bad Girl Bakery) and into the curiously named Black Isle, which isn’t an island at all. At Fortrose, we weave our way along minor roads clogged with camper vans and out on to Chanonry Point (a name I’ll come back to), where there’s a madly busy car park at the end of a remote and apparently undistinguished promontory.

On the shoreline, when the tide is right, there’s a crowd of people staring out to sea, going “Ooooh,” and sometimes “Aaaah.”

That’s Fort George on the far shore, built by the Hanoverian army to control the narrows here at the entrance to the Moray Firth. On the rising tide, shoals of fish pass through this choke-point, and they’re pursued by a pod of bottlenose dolphins, which is what everyone’s here to see.

Back to that name Chanonry, which is the Scots equivalent of English canonry—a place where canons live. The canons involved are those belonging to the thirteenth century diocese of Ross, who seem to have had an establishment in Fortrose, dating from before the building of Fortrose Cathedral.

Back down the road a way, in Beauly, the religious theme continues with Beauly Priory:

This monastery is the reason a town in Scotland has ended up with a French name—Beauly comes from beau lieu, “beautiful place”. And before the Reformation, the priory housed members of the French Valliscaulian order.

Back at base, I was sitting reading one evening when I glanced up to see a pine marten scampering across the decking outside. So next time we arrived prepared—strawberry jam, sultanas, and a motion-activated camera:

But the poor marten was not without competition:

Who knew that red deer like strawberry jam?

I finished my previous post about our Orkney trip with a photograph of the salvaged propeller of HMS Hampshire, which sits in the forecourt of the Scapa Flow Museum on Hoy.

The Hampshire wreck actually lies on the seabed some distance from Hoy and Scapa Flow—between Marwick Head and Brough Head, on the Atlantic coast of Mainland Orkney. It sank in 1916 after striking a mine laid by the German submarine U-75, with the loss of 737 men. One of those on board was Field Marshal Earl Kitchener, who was travelling on a diplomatic mission to the Russian port of Arkhangelsk. Kitchener being something of a Big Deal, a tower was erected to his memory in 1926, on the bleak summit of Marwick Head.

The promontory in the distance is the Brough of Birsay, a tidal island. (Pronouncing unfamiliar -ough words is always a puzzle—this one is pronounced /brox/, like the Iron Age stone tower, a broch.)

The fact that it’s called the Kitchener Memorial, rather than the Hampshire Memorial, says a lot about the times. The dedication reads:

THIS TOWER WAS RAISED
BY THE PEOPLE OF ORKNEY
IN MEMORY OF
FIELD MARSHAL EARL KITCHENER
OF KHARTOUM
ON THAT CORNER OF HIS COUNTRY,
WHICH HE HAD SERVED SO FAITHFULLY,
NEAREST TO THE PLACE
WHERE HE DIED ON DUTY.
–o–
HE AND HIS STAFF PERISHED ALONG WITH
THE OFFICERS AND NEARLY ALL THE MEN OF
H.M.S. HAMPSHIRE ON 5^TH JUNE 1916.

The other 736 men come across as a bit of an afterthought, don’t you think? But in 2016 funds were raised to add the little curved wall visible in front of the tower in the photograph below:

On its inner curve, this memorial wall lists the names of all those who died on the Hampshire, as well as nine more from HM Drifter Laurel Crown, who died when their ship struck another of the mines laid by the U-75.

Apart from Scapa Flow and Vikings, Orkney is also famous for its Neolithic remains—you occasionally drive past a house with a standing stone at the bottom of its garden.

On a strip of moorland between two lochs sits the Ring of Brodgar:

We timed our visit to avoid the regular tour-groups, and had the site more or less to ourselves for twenty minutes, during which time the place was alive with birdsong—curlews, meadow pipits, skylarks:

We kept an eye out for an Orkney vole, but were disappointed.

Nearby are the Stones of Stenness—fewer in number than the Brodgar ring, but substantially larger:

The stones you can see here are all that remains of what is probably the oldest stone circle in Britain. These are Orcadian icons, and you can see their shapes echoed in everything from the glass restaurant awards on display in our hotel dining room to the Arctic Convoys memorial on Hoy:

And then, of course, there’s Skara Brae, a Neolithic settlement beside the Bay of Skaill that had been hidden under a huge sand dune, until a massive storm in 1850 stripped off the stabilizing grass cover and blew away enough of the sand to expose the buildings beneath. (That vanished dune, by the way, was the original Skara Brae, brae being a Scots word for “hill”. Norse again, I need hardly say.)

Although being in the presence of something older than the Giza pyramids is quite a striking idea, the site itself was weirdly disappointing—having read about it often, and seen it frequently on television, the real thing felt oddly small and anticlimactic. Strangely, the reconstructed house beside the visitor centre seemed more impressive. I feel like I should actually apologize for that.

We both found ourselves more drawn to the neolithic site at Barnhouse, near the Stones of Stenness. For all that it lacked the three-dimensional, visibly lived-in aspect of Skara Brae, there was something pleasing about its symmetry—and, of course, we had the place to ourselves.

You’ll perhaps notice a distinct change in the weather, in the photograph above. The Boon Companion and I had been swanning around under pristine blue skies and light winds for several days, and found ourselves frequently congratulated by native Orcadians for “bringing the good weather”. In fact, a guide at Skara Brae laughingly assured us that, “there is no word in Orcadian for a fourth successive day of sunshine”.*

So it all started to go pear-shaped, midweek.

One day we drove out to the abandoned gunnery range buildings at Yesnaby, and the wind almost took the car doors off.

Wearing every item of warm clothing we possessed, we skittered along the top of the cliffs, keeping well back from the edge, to pay a visit to Yesnaby Castle sea stack:

Then we skittered back again, and the doors almost came off the car, again.

The next day, with the wind still howling across the flat fields, we decided it might be a day for indoors pursuits, so we visited Stromness.

The tourist guides say not to take your car into town, because the roads are so narrow. The main street didn’t seem that bad to me, but it does have some extremely steep and narrow lanes opening off it:

We dived out of the wind into the wonderland of Stromness Museum, a marvellous clutter of Orcadian history packed into a confusing sequence of tiny rooms. One section is devoted to Dr John Rae, the Orcadian Arctic explorer who (among other things) gleaned the first useful information about the fate of the lost Franklin Expedition to Arctic Canada (I’ve written quite a lot about that in this post). But Rae had the misfortune to be the honest bearer of bad news—he passed on Inuit testimony that the starving sailors had resorted to cannibalism when in extremis, which did not sit well with Victorian society, and he found himself attacked and defamed by no less a figure than Charles Dickens.

But he is now commemorated by a fine statue at Stromness pier-head:

And I have to say I’m much taken with the effigy that marks his tomb in St Magnus Cathedral. Rather than reclining stiffly and symmetrical on a marble slab, looking simultaneously pious and dead, Rae’s effigy is practically an action figure:

He’s quite obviously sleeping comfortably in the wild somewhere, his notebook and his rifle ready to hand.

So that was Orkney. All seasons in a single week, but mainly Spring.

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* We took his point, and enjoyed the joke, but now I’m left wondering if a language exists in which there is a word designating a fourth successive day of sunshine.

The advent of a new scheduled flight between Dundee and the Orkney Islands, off the north coast of Scotland, seemed like too good an opportunity to miss, and the Boon Companion and I booked seats shortly after the flights began in April.

The route goes pretty much straight north from Dundee, and we had a nice day for it:

Those who know the Angus glens will recognize Glen Clova (coming in from left of frame) and Loch Muick (behind the propeller blade) with snowy Lochnagar beyond.

The Orkney Islands are old Norse territory—part of the Kingdom of Denmark, Norway and Sweden until an event that’s splendidly known as the Impignoration, in 1468. In that year, the impoverished Scandinavian King Christian I had to come up with a dowry for his daughter, Margaret, who was to marry King James III of Scotland. In the absence of hard cash, he effectively pawned the Orkneys—handing them over to Scotland, but with the option of redeeming them at a later date for the sum of 50,000 Rhenish florins. (A further 10,000 florins was due to be paid in cash, but after a year Christian had only been able to cough up 2,000, so the Shetland Islands went into pawn, too, for the remaining 8,000 florins.)

But the long Scandinavian residency has left its mark on the landscape, leaving a legacy of Norse placenames—there are gills and fells and dales and holms here. But I hadn’t previously encountered “quoy” (from Old Norse kví, “enclosed land”), which turns up in many Orcadian placenames.

The Orcadians are proud of their Norse heritage, and that pride is on display as soon as you land at Kirkwall Airport:

Yep, the airport sign is written in Nordic runes (the Younger Futhark, to be precise). It reads ᚴᚱᛁᛘᛋᛁᛏᛁᚱ, which we can transliterate as GRIMSITIR, and translate as “Grim’s homestead”. The modern placename is Grimsetter, and the airport evolved from a wartime airfield, RAF Grimsetter. (Because of the strategic importance of the anchorage at Scapa Flow, Orkney boasted no fewer than four airfields during the Second World War—the other three were at Skeabrae, Hatston, and the unfortunately named Twatt. The Air Force was spared the ignominy of operating out of RAF Twatt, however—the airfield was used by the Fleet Air Arm, who in naval fashion designated it a landlocked ship, and referred to it as HMS Tern. So that all worked out well.)

The drive into Kirkwall in our shiny new hired car was short, and we had time to kill before we could check into our accommodation, so we stopped for a wander around town. This proved to be utterly mobbed with middle-aged-to-elderly couples wearing identical red parkas—evidently, a cruise ship had come in. But we found a quiet location for a stroll, around the Peedie Sea*—a pleasant little lake full of swans and waterfowl. When we visited it was hosting a flotilla of very natty-looking long-tailed ducks. They’re passage migrants in the UK, and were presumably just stopping off for a rest and a feed on their way north to breed in Iceland.

Across the water, we had a view of the Kirkwall skyline, dominated by the twelfth-century bulk of St Magnus Cathedral.

Our accommodation, when we got there, gave us a nice view of Scapa Flow, one of the largest natural harbours in the world. Once, this would have been full of British warships; now it plays host to the occasional between-jobs oil-rig, as well as tankers arriving at the oil terminal on the island of Flotta.

On our first day we headed east and then south, threading our way down the series of causeways that connect the large island of Mainland to the small islands of Lamb Holm and Glimps Holm, and then the somewhat bigger islands of Burray and South Ronaldsay.

During the First World War, the gaps between these islands were partially blocked by deliberately sinking ships in the channels, thereby limiting the number of potential routes in and out of Scapa Flow, and reducing the number of coastal defence installations required to protect access to the anchorage. With the onset of the Second World War, more of these blockships were sunk, and plans were drawn up for the construction of the Churchill Barriers between the islands, completely sealing off these approaches. (The need for such a thorough blockade was demonstrated in 1939, when the German submarine U-47 managed to circumvent the existing blockship in Kirk Sound, between Mainland and Lamb Holm, and enter Scapa Flow undetected, where it torpedoed and sank HMS Royal Oak.)

The barriers were constructed during the course of the Second World War, with much of the work carried out by Italian prisoners of war. While the 1929 Geneva Convention on the treatment of PoWs prohibits their employment on purely military projects, the fact that a roadway was to be built along the top of the barriers magically transformed their construction into a civil engineering project, on which PoW labour could be used. One gets the feeling that the letter, but not the spirit, of the Convention was being adhered to.

As you drive across the Barriers today, you can look out and see the remains of the blockships in shallow water. Here’s the SS Reginald beside Barrier Number Three, looking back towards Glimps Holm, with the barrier itself at left of frame, marked by the big blue bus:

Over the decades, Barrier Number Four, between Burray and South Ronaldsay, has gathered an extensive beach along its eastern side, and the associated blockships have all been engulfed in sand. Back in 1990 the superstructure of one blockship could still be seen protruded from the beach:

The Italian PoWs left a lovely legacy on Lamb Holm, where they constructed a chapel from two Nissen huts.

The interior is gorgeously decorated with trompe-l’œil painting:

Farther south, we wandered through the narrow streets of the curiously named town of St Margaret’s Hope:

While I’m sure Saint Margaret of Scotland was a hopeful lady, this is another one of those Norse names— hóp meant “shallow bay”.

Some of the houses on the waterfront seemed to have their own private slipways, one of which had attracted a visitor:

West of St Margaret’s Hope lies Hoxa Head, overlooking the Sound of Hoxa, which is one of the main entrances to Scapa Flow. Unsurprisingly, it was well fortified during the First and Second World Wars, and most of the military buildings are still standing (some just barely), like this observation post:

The next day, we took a ferry to the island of Hoy, which has a completely different character from Mainland Orkney. Instead of flat farmland, Hoy is all rolling moorland:

We headed down to the Atlantic-facing beach at Rackwick, and then walked up the steep path that curves around the shoulder of Moor Fea. (More Norse—fea is an Orcadian version of Norse fjall, “hill”.) From a strategically placed bench, we were able to look back down on the bay:

It all looks very peaceful, until you consider that Rackwick is rek vík, “wreckage bay”.

We ended our Hoy trip where we started, at the Lyness ferry terminal. Lyness is now no more than a scatter of houses, making it difficult to imagine that it was once a massive naval base, housing 12,000 personnel during the Second World War. (The ferry uses one of the jetties constructed for that base.) The Scapa Flow Museum is just a short walk from the ferry terminal, and will fill up your brain with the military history of the area, if you’re that way inclined.

The propeller is from the wreck of HMS Hampshire, which didn’t sink in Scapa Flow. I’ll write more about that next time, when I deal with our various wanderings around Mainland, the main island of Orkney.

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* Peedie is an Orcadian word, meaning “small”. Orcadians use it whenever a mainland Scot would say “wee”, and they like it enough to put it on souvenir T-shirts and mugs. Then again, they also decorate their souvenir T-shirts and mugs with reproductions of the road-signs directing drivers to Twatt. There’s no accounting for taste.

The Boon Companion and I finally got around to a bit of international travel recently. Airports and aeroplanes proved to be just as ghastly as we remembered them, but it was nice to get away from a very damp Scotland for a blink of October sun in the south of France. The Côte d’Azur has featured before on this blog, back in 2016 and 2018, but I thought I’d wheel it out again because of its post-Covid landmark status, and because I can probably find a few new things to say about it.

Our hotel (seen on the sky-line in the photo below) sits at the narrow neck of Cap Ferrat, roughly in the middle of a triangle formed by the towns of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Beaulieu-Sur-Mer and Villefranche-Sur-Mer. All were within easy walking distance, so we idled away our days getting up late, eating breakfast on the terrace, ambling into some town or other for lunch, and then drifting back for a snooze before dinner.

Right outside the hotel is the beginning of the Promenade Maurice-Rouvier, which weaves its way past some stonking great villas and some rather dilapidated little one-boat harbours.

The jetties are always littered with a (to me) very odd-looking organic detritus, completely unlike the bladderwrack that characterizes the strandline back home in Scotland.

This turns out to be the leaves of Neptune Grass, Posidonia oceanica, which is entirely confined to the Mediterranean. It can form up into large drifts, locally called banquettes, which are reputedly why the inlet to the east of Cap Ferrat is called the Plage des Fourmis (“Beach of Ants”)—the banquettes occasionally gather into well-defined mounds, like ant-hills. (Or so the story goes, though it seems odd that inhabitants of the Mediterranean coast would be unable to tell their anthills from their banquettes.) Posidonia leaves also occasionally roll up into spherical objects commonly known as “Neptune Balls”, which we recently learned are good at gathering up plastic debris. (Scientifically, they’re called aegagropilae, which is a horrendous Greek/Latin mash-up meaning “hair-ball”.)

The three towns all have their own character. Saint-Jean has a busy marina crammed with yachts and yachty people, and is probably my least favourite, despite having been a filming location for that British televisual classic, The Persuaders! (1971).

Beaulieu has a Belle Époque thing going on in its architecture, harking back to its time as a winter watering-hole for the wealthy, during the nineteenth century.

And below is the pretty little Chapel of Sancta Maria de Olivo, which has a name that is neither Italian (Santa Maria dell’Olivo) or French (Sainte-Marie de l’Olivier), but somewhere in between—I suspect it’s the name of Our Lady of the Olive Tree as rendered in Provençal, though it doesn’t quite conform to the vocabulary in my Petit Dictionnaire Provençal-Français.

On our way back from Beaulieu, we ran into a notably elegant trio, who turned out to be on their way to a seriously out-of-season Christmas party taking place on the Plage des Fourmis right next to our hotel. (Note the antlers on the party-goers, and the Christmas tree among the tables, below.)

So our afternoon peace was somewhat marred by a barrage of French techno remixes of 1980s pop classics for the next few hours. Odd.

Meanwhile, on the western side of Cap Ferrat, the long arc of the Plage des Marinières was still cluttered with late-season sunbathers.

We poked around in the narrow mediaeval streets of the old town, where the Provençal language is preserved on some of the street signs, and then we headed for an open-air restaurant that overlooks the chapel of Saint-Pierre des Pecheurs, decorated by Jean Cocteau during the 1950s.

This sits on the Avenue Sadi Carnot, which I like to think is named after Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, who pretty much invented the science of thermodynamics; but I fear that it actually honours his nephew, Marie François Sadi Carnot, who has the comparatively trivial distinction of having been President of France for a while.

If you’re ever in the vicinity, turn your back on Cocteau’s chapel and looking upwards. You can pick out some rather nice trompe l’œil paintwork on the buildings opposite—some additional shuttered windows on the right, and a fake corner just below the roof-line on the left, which creates an appearance of symmetry where none actually exists.

And we made our usual trip to the gardens of the Villa Ephrussi, where fountains perform choreographed evolutions to classical music every 20 minutes.

This time around, there seemed to be something wrong with their speaker system, but you can get some idea of the effect from this short, silent video shot by the Boon Companion.

The carp in the ponds seem to be used to visitors—simply by breaking their sky-line you can receive a deputation of three or four of them, probably hopeful for food.

We usually round off our visit with a bite of lunch in the Villa’s ornate restaurant, where the service has always been amusingly snooty—but this time, as we waited for the serving staff to even acknowledge our existence, it became evident that the snootiness had overshot into just plain annoying, so we wandered off back into Beaulieu and ate a baguette in the sunshine instead.

And that was that—a brief, but pleasant, return to foreign travel.

Air travel still being something of a tedious lottery in the UK at present, the Boon Companion and I have not entered an airport since our return from Morocco during the very early days of Covid. We’ve contented ourselves by knocking around Scotland, and I haven’t posted much about those travels, since they’ve either been very short visits, or longer stays in places I’ve written about before.

This time, we made a return visit to the north coast of Scotland, which I’ve previously written about, but we stayed for a week in a place that we shot through very quickly during our last visit—Durness.

Durness sits at a corner in the road, where the main drag from John o’ Groats, which has faithfully followed the north coast westwards up to that point, abruptly turns southwest, cutting across the northwest corner of mainland Scotland to reach the west coast near Kinlochbervie. It’s one of those Scottish villages that seems to be smeared thinly over a disproportionately large area—coming in from the east you encounter the “Welcome to Durness” sign in the middle of open moorland sparsely dotted with houses.

You drive for about a mile before running into the little patch of mixed vehicular/pedestrian madness around the start of the short path to the Smoo Cave. Then it all thins out again for another mile before you arrive at a petrol station, hotel/bunkhouse, public toilet, and the inevitable Spar shop. And then you’re pretty quickly out the far end.

We got to the north coast by driving the long, scenic single-track road that runs from Lairg to Tongue, passing Ben Klibreck and Ben Loyal—I’ve previously written about the ascent of both these hills. We stopped on a corner of the road above Tongue to admire the view back towards the cliffs of Ben Loyal’s Sgor Chaonasaid, with the turret of An Caisteal peeping over its shoulder:

Our accommodation featured a long picture window and patio overlooking Loch Eriboll.

It really did feature all mod cons, including an outdoor bathing option:

And in a storeroom I discovered the back-up hairdryer, which enjoyed the most tin-eared product name I’ve seen in a while:

What can we call our new hairdryer? I know, let’s name it after the space capsule that suffered a catastrophic electrical fire, killing three astronauts!

We’d somewhat mistimed our visit—we’d waited until the end of the Scottish school holidays, but soon discovered that the English and German schools were still out, leading to a bit of camper-van clutter on the narrow roads and in the small car-parks. Many of these were being driven by frazzled-looking people with white knuckles who seemed absolutely amazed to discover that driving the North Coast 500 involved travelling many miles on single-track roads, and many of whom had apparently bought vehicles without a reverse gear—this being the only explanation I can think of for their inability to roll backwards a few yards to allow oncoming traffic to ease past at the nearest passing place.

So we skipped the walk to Smoo Cave, the path to which was mobbed every time we passed; and we also never seemed to get around to the John Lennon Memorial Garden. Instead, we wandered around the paths of the Durness Walking Network, which seemed to be largely deserted apart from local dog-walkers, and visited the many lovely beaches in the area, which were similar quiet—apart from what seems to be commonly known as Ceannabeinne Beach*, which sports a cluttered car-park and what Peter Irvine, in his Scotland The Best guide of 2019, eloquently calls “that fecking unsightly zipline”.

Just along the road, the beach at Sango Bay was a lot quieter, despite being right next to Durness, perhaps because it’s not readily visible from the main road:

And then there are the mile-long sands at Balnakeil Bay:

There’s a pleasant walk along the peninsula here, overlooking the beach, which passed through some beautiful wild flower meadows—I think the purple flowers below may be devil’s-bit scabious:

I know that sounds like a skin disease, but the various scabious plants were so-called because they were supposed to be good for treating skin diseases. (The “devil’s bit” refers to the appearance of the root, which reportedly comes to an apparently chopped-off end, as if something underground had bitten it.)

At the head of Balnakeil Bay sits the improbable Durness Golf Club, as well as a fine old ruined church and graveyard which the Boon Companion has rendered marvellously gothic:

And just up the road is the Balnakeil Craft Village—originally built during the Cold War as some sort of Distant Early Warning installation, then abandoned by the military and taken over by a growing community of artists, and now perhaps falling into a bit of a decline as the founding population ages.

It’s easy to discern the military origins of the barracks-like buildings, many of which have characteristic towers containing water storage tanks:

But the style of decoration is anything but military:

There’s an absolutely fascinating article about the history of the community here. Please go and read it. I’ll wait here.

There’s another lovely beach at Oldshoremore, near Kinlochbervie, but it was hosting what seemed to be some sort of beach sports day for a school outing when we were there, so I’ll show you the view inland from the Kinlochbervie road instead:

The water is Loch Inchard, and the hills on the skyline are, from left to right, Foinaven, Arkle and Ben Stack. (I’ve written about climbing Ben Stack previously.) The photograph was taken from the tiny settlement of Badcall, a name that amuses much more than is strictly reasonable.

At a time when many parts of the UK were stricken by the worst drought in decades, it was good to see that good old Scottish weather was managing to keep the local reservoirs full. Here’s the spillway of the dam at Loch Meadaidh, in the moorland above Durness, on a gloomily overcast day:

Back at base, the endlessly changing light and weather meant that we had a new view every few minutes. Here are two views of Ben Hope seen across Loch Eriboll, for example:

Wildlife encounters were largely confined to the binoculars. We had a little pod of dolphins go by as we stood on the cliff at Aodann Mhor. And a few sporadic whoops from the loch sent me out in front of the house to discover what looked at first to be an improbable assembly of two adult and four juvenile divers, but which (at the limit of my binoculars) I eventually decided were early-arriving Great Northern Divers, two in their summer breeding plumage and four non-breeding—my reference books tell me that they start to pitch up to overwinter around the Scottish coast in mid-August. The following day, I could see only three. Then I never saw them again. Presumably Eriboll was merely a stopping-off point on their way farther south.

So the only wildlife photograph I can offer you is this one, taken at the edge of our patio:

(I was going to accompany the photograph with a laboured pun about wildlife being “thin, on the ground”, but I decided against it.)

Anyway, this valiant little fellow, an impressive 7 or 8 centimetres long, is (I believe) the second-year caterpillar of a northern Oak Eggar moth.

So, that was that. By way of variety we returned south down the “Hope Road”—a narrow and overgrown ribbon of tarmac, thirty kilometres in length, that is supposedly so-named because it runs between Loch Hope and Ben Hope, but everyone knows the name is actually because you’d better just hope you don’t meet anything coming in the opposite direction. Here’s a typical section at the north end:

Farther south, the sight-lines get a little longer and there are some more formal passing places, but it’s still an interesting drive. I was keen to revisit the Hope Road because I wanted to visit the Dun Dornaigil broch. (On my previous visit to the area, I’d been unable to persuade my hillwalking buddies to stop off on our way to climb Ben Hope.)

From the broch, we took one last look northwards toward Ben Hope, and then started the long drive home.

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* Ceannabeinne is actually the name of a nearby hill. The Ordnance Survey calls the beach itself Tràigh Allt Chàilgeag.

With Covid lockdown lifted (at least for now) but international travel still looking like a Very Bad Idea for the rest of the year, the Boon Companion and I are back to travelling around Scotland. Our most recent trip was to Kylerhea, at the eastern end of the Isle of Skye.

It’s not a particularly easy place to get to. From the rest of Skye, it’s reached by a scenic, tortuous, single-track road, the last section of which you can see in the image above.

From the mainland, in summer, it can be reached from the palindromic village of Glenelg, via the little six-car ferry that plies back and forth across the Kyle Rhea narrows. The tide rips through this narrow strait at a rate of knots, such that the ferry occasionally has to travel almost sideways between its two piers.

But Glenelg is connected to the rest of Scotland by another scenic, tortuous, single-track road.

So it’s an interesting place to get to. But once there, we were comfortably installed in a self-catering “cottage” with a fine view over the narrows to the mainland.

The weather was … well … Skye in May. So a bit of mixed bag, but we had a period of sunshine every day, as you’ll glean from the photographs.

We did our usual thing of driving somewhere and then spending a few hours walking through the scenery, but we did also need to keep pulling over to admire the views along the way, too.

From the little village of Plockton we walked along the coast through an honest-to-god rhododendron forest, to the baronial pile of Duncraig Castle, which, like Dunrobin Castle, has its own little railway station, complete with an octagonal wooden waiting room (first-class only, I imagine).

On another day we wended our way past the Talisker Distillery to reach the lovely little Talisker Bay.

The sand at Talisker is a slightly surreal mix of volcanic black and cockleshell white, which sorts itself continuously into new patterns as the tide ebbs and flows.

And we drove past the striking war memorial at Glenelg to reach the brochs of Gleannbeag.

I’ve written about Scottish brochs before, when I made my Three Brochs Tour during lockdown, but now I can give you an impression of what the original structures must have looked like. The view of Dun Troddan, above, shows the complex structure of the walls, which contained internal stairs and what seems to have been a passive ventilation system so that rainwater which penetrated the outer drystone wall did not make the interior space damp.

On the wildlife front, we had a few distant deer, a white-tailed eagle above the Talisker road, and this little fellow, who clonked off the picture window one evening:

It might be a Willow Warbler, it might be a Chiffchaff. Their song is reportedly the best way to tell them apart, but it was understandably not in the mood for singing. But after a while it had a little experimental hop around (straightening those alarmingly bent toes), gave me a reproachful look, and flew off.

So. Our first trip of 2021, after a lockdown cancellation earlier in the year. There are more planned—we’ll see how that turns out.

With foreign travel currently falling into the “More Trouble Than It’s Worth” category, The Boon Companion and I have been using the brief periods between travel bans to enjoy what are nowadays called staycations, but when we were growing up were called “proper holidays”—that is, leaving home and staying in another part of the country for a few days.

Ullapool was the venue for the first “proper holiday” I can remember—a week in a caravan at Rhue Point*, enlivened by the fact that my father’s car blew a cylinder-head gasket on the way north, and it took the entire duration of the holiday for a replacement part to arrive. And it rained every day. I contentedly read through a vast stockpile of espionage thrillers, blissfully assuming that this was what a “proper holiday” involved, while my parents went quietly stir-crazy.

No caravan, this time. We stayed in a spacious self-catering place above the town, and largely avoided the rain despite the lateness of the season.

From Ullapool, we made short drives north, south or west and then got out of the car, wandered around, and looked at stuff. Very much the way a “proper holiday” was supposed to be, back in the day.

To the north is the mad landscape of Coigach and Assynt. We made a little circuit of the Coigach peninsula, lurching frequently off the single-track road at random flat bits as each new photographic opportunity arose.

And we wandered around the path network on Knockan Crag, which is full of interpretive signboards explaining the geology, interesting geology-themed sculpture, and really jaw-dropping views of the surrounding mountains.

South lies Leal Forest and the Corrieshalloch Gorge. Leal is a “forest garden”, deliberately planted in groves of native and foreign trees during the nineteenth century, so there’s plenty of mature timber to gawp at. Corrieshalloch is a surprisingly spectacular slot, carved by the Abhainn Droma, hidden away right next to the A835. In the past, its presence was heralded by busloads of tourists wandering obliviously back and forth across the trunk road from a conveniently placed lay-by, but that access has now been shut down, and a proper car park constructed on the opposite side of the gorge, off the A832, which doesn’t involve death-defying mass road crossings.

West took us to the beaches of (successively) Gruinard Bay, Loch Ewe and the tautologous Loch Gairloch. I can never get these three inlets straight in my head, in part because each of them contains its own right-of-centre island—Gruinard Island, Isle of Ewe and Longa Island. The first-named is the notorious site of a British bio-weapon test in 1942, which left it uninhabitable for fifty years. The old warning signs along its beaches used to be easily discernible with binoculars from the mainland. Since the alleged decontamination of the site, they seem to have been removed—but I saw one behind the bar of a local hotel a few years, which was disconcerting.

On the wildlife front, we were regularly visited by a couple of young red deer, one of whom I managed to catch teetering across our patio at dead of night, investigating (and then rejecting) some sliced apple I’d left out as bait. (Calum the Stag at Torridon is very partial to a bit of sliced apple.)

And that was that. Home just in time for another travel ban. Oh well.

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* A bilingual tautology, Rhue being derived from Gaelic rubha, “promontory”.

Only a few years back, a voyage to Morocco necessitated long preparation: servants, guides, animals for riding, camping materials, much time, and therefore great fatigue and heavy expenses. Though the greatest care was taken, comfort, while moving or at rest, was non-existent, and travellers were sometimes exposed to very disagreeable adventures. Things have changed.

Prosper Ricard, Morocco: The Illustrated Guide (1924)

We took our trip for a little winter sunshine farther afield this year, and spent some time in Morocco. We divided our time between Marrakesh, north of the High Atlas; Ouarzazate, on the south side; and Essaouira, on the Atlantic coast.

Having flown into Marrakesh’s rather spiffy airport, we spent our first night at the entrance to the Ourika Valley, with a view of the snowy Atlas Mountains in the distance.

When visiting Moslem countries I’ve always enjoyed hearing the adhan, the call to prayer. It was particularly pleasant in the evening cool at Ourika, when the mu’azzins at each mosque in the valley seemed to take turns, to avoid drowning each other out. So the cry of Allahu akbar! came again and again, from different locations in the twilight, each time in a different voice and with a different style.

The next day, we drove (were driven, actually, and thank goodness in retrospect) over the Tizi n’Tichka, the highest pass in the Atlas. The whole northern approach seemed to be one long, continuous roadworks, with steep drop-offs on one side, decorated with the bent remnants of crash barriers, and falling rocks coming down from the other side.

The contrast between the north and south sides of the Atlas is dramatic, with the south lying in the rain-shadow of the mountains. Compare the fertile view above with the one below, taken a little distance east of Ouarzazate:

Ouarzazate itself was a surprise. We had half-expected a sleepy little desert village. It turns out to be a large and prosperous-looking town, full of new buildings, fresh paint and impressive boulevards.

It’s the centre of the Moroccan film industry (“Mollywood”, we were told), and we drove past several sprawling studio lots, which have provided locations for many motion pictures over the years. And just outside town there’s the old fortified village of Aït Benhaddou, which has provided settings for many more:

Then back over the pass to Marrakesh, a town that enjoys two different spellings of its name—in English, Marrakesh; in French, Marrakech.

French is commonly spoken in Morocco, a relic of the French Protectorate period in the early twentieth century. Road signs are bilingual in Arabic and French, which is a blessing if (like me) the Arabic alphabet is a closed book to you. Government buildings also frequently sport a third language, in a third alphabet:

The middle band of writing is in the Neo-Tifinagh alphabet used for Berber languages. Until fairly recently you could be arrested for using Tifinagh in Morocco—but times change, and this sign is outside the police station.

There seems to be some sort of ordinance in Marrakesh that it must live up to its nickname, “The Red City”. Although most buildings are concrete, they’re all painted in shades of ochre and terracotta—the colour of the traditional building material, rammed red earth.

Marrakesh is mad with bustle and crazy driving. Most of the zebra crossing appear to be advisory only—the only way to cross the road is to stride out boldly into the traffic, and hope that motorists will be too embarrassed to actually kill someone at an official crossing place. Even in the narrow streets of the souks, there’s an alarming amount of traffic:

But the souks are fascinating, divided into sections according to trade. The owners seem to vie with each other for the most colourful and symmetrical displays:

From the souk, you stumble out into the sunlight of Jemaa el-Fnaa, a teeming open square lined with even more shops:

In Jemaa el-Fnaa, you can have your fortune told, get a henna tattoo, hold a Barbary macaque, listen to Gnaoua music, and watch the snake tormentors charmers at work. Oh, and buy a bit of fruit if you’re so inclined.

Nearby, in a street leading down to Koutoubia mosque, horse-drawn carriages are lined up, ready to take tourists on a tour of the city. The horses must be high on actual horse tranquilizers, since they trot along unconcernedly as Marrakeshi drivers shoot past inches from their shoulders. The street smells exactly the way you’d expect, for a cobbled street in which many horses spend a lot of time—it smells jumentous, which is a word meaning “resembling the urine of a horse” I’ve been waiting all my life to use in natural conversation.

Our last visit was to Essaouira, with its rolling Atlantic breakers, colourful old Portuguese harbour, constant winds, and (it would appear) and ordinance requiring white paint on all its buildings.

After frenetic Marrakesh, it was nice to stroll down a street that contained nothing more threatening than the occasional bicycle.

On the wildlife front, we had some interesting bird encounters. There were a lot of urban White Storks, often roosting on top of Morocco’s many mobile-phone-masts-disguised-as-palm-trees:

Or making their gigantic nests on mosque minarets:

They perform an amicable bill-clapping ritual when they’re both on the nest, and our hotel room in Marrakesh used to resound to that curiously soothing sound. Here’s a sample from xeno-canto:

Isn’t that nice?

In the evening, the pretty tingitanus subspecies of House Sparrow would arrive in noisy flocks to settle in the courtyard of our hotel:

In the hour before dusk, the room would fill with a cacophony of social chirping—which would suddenly and intermittently fall silent. Peering into the trees from our window, I quickly spotted the cause:

A male kestrel was sitting in the palm tree outside, occasionally launching attacks on the sparrows as they arrived. At the sight of his wings in the courtyard, the assembled flock would immediately fall silent. I was able to find my way on to the hotel roof, and look down on the fierce little raptor as he went about his business—falconry by proxy.

Finally, there is the vexed matter of goats up trees. There’s no doubt that goats climb trees in Morocco. They do it in pursuit of argan fruit. Here are some, for instance, going about their happy caprine capers:

And on the road to Essaouira, we were flagged down by a little boy who pointed eagerly towards … a tree full of goats. Positively brimming with goats, one would have to say:

While the Boon Companion took photographs. I contemplated the goats. None of them were eating anything. Many were standing at the ends of branches with no foliage at all, facing outwards. And some of them seemed to be standing on tangles of branches that looked … well, platform-like. I let my gaze wander to the other trees in the vicinity. As far as they eye could see, they were uniformly goatless. I let my gaze wander back to “our” conveniently placed roadside tree, where our guide was passing out money to the child and an accompanying adult. Hmmm.

I’m not at all averse to farmers scoring a bit of extra cash from passing tourists. I’m just not entirely convinced that these goats were willing participants in the scheme. To paraphrase Hippy Carnes from The Abyss (1989), I think they may be doin’ it, but they ain’t diggin’ it. (I would like to know how they get them up there, though, and how often the shifts change.)

And then it was time to go home. Where we slipped into Heathrow under the coat-tails of Storm Ciara, and then didn’t see the sun again for a week.