The Turtle Moves

Lurker in the shrubbery

What is that lurking in the undergrowth? A Berserker!

We decided a mirror would be nice to add a bit of light and interest in the garden, so we got a sheet of mirrored acrylic. M'Dear Husband stuck it to some plywood and made it a frame. Unfortunately, thin acrylic sheet warps very easily, so we decided to set the mirror at an angle so that you didn't walk up to it face on, otherwise it gave a sort of fairground 'hall of mirrors' effect to your appearance. Thus, it reflects bits of the shrubbery when you're on the patio, and bits of the patio when you're down on the path by the shrubbery. I thought it would be good if it also revealed glimpses of something mysterious in the undergrowth, and it just so happened that last week was Perthshire Open Studios - so off we went to see what we could find.

In Blairgowrie, there's a retired dentist who's taken up working with stone. Among the copies of Pictish carving and the sleeping hares there was this wee red sandstone bloke - a berserker (what the Lewis Chessmen have instead of a Rook). He has very ferocious teeth - perhaps his maker was channelling his former employment. You can see him more clearly in this picture of him face on rather than reflected.

We also visited a lovely lady in Alyth, who is possibly the best basket maker and willow weaver in the country.

She's done loads of fabulous decorative hurdles

for various projects around Scotland, and she makes coracles too. I urge you to visit if you're ever up this way.

We bought a 'bothy basket'. The different colours are different varieties of willow and the handle is a piece of hazel branch. It's about 15" tall and I've sat it in the hearth - perhaps it should hold kindling or something.

Maisie's still not sure about our new addition to the garden!

 

Tiree

The second week we moved to a cottage on Tiree - a very different island from Coll, even though they're just a couple of miles apart. Tiree is very flat and feels almost below sea level. It has miles and miles of white sand beaches all round its coast and is very very windy. There are no rabbits on Tiree, but there are loads of hares - we saw lots. Once again our cottage was close to a beach - this time without even a field to cross - more Maisie heaven.

It was once again a converted but and ben, only instead of putting extensions to front and rear, they had built up the roof into an inverted U shape and fitted two bedrooms up there. Quite a lot of the cottages on Tiree looked like this. You can see how thick the walls are, which made the house very easy to heat with the multi-fuel stove.

We visited a ruined broch on the headland at Vaul (Bhala in gaelic).

 

 

Beautiful blue skies, but boy, was it windy!

This broch, Dun Mor Bhala, is Iron Age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Further round the coast from the Broch is the Ringing Stone - a huge 'erratic' boulder (a granitic rock dumped by a glacier onto the predominantly gneiss rock of this part of Tiree) which has cup marks pecked out in it, from pre-historic times. If you hit this rock with a pebble, the rock resonates with a distinctly metallic ring.
As I mentioned, Tiree has miles and miles of white sand. This is just a tiny part of Gott Bay. You can probably also see that the sand is blowing - it's still windy!

Some of the cottages have been refurbished and re-thatched - very pretty.

We liked Tiree, but preferred Coll - there was more variety in the scenery there. Maisie, however was ecstatic wherever we were - she was out and about with both members of her pack - what more could a dog want.

She had sand to bury her ball in.

 

 

 

 

 

And sea to wash it in. She was a very salty little girl when we got home.

The Cone of Shame

Hello there.

Our wee Maisie is a grown up girl now and because I can't inflict puppies on my long-suffering husband (I wrestled long and hard over this - let me tell you. Puppies! Yes! Fuss and bother and miserable husband. No.) I took her to the Vet last Friday and she was spayed.

The weekend was fine because she was groggy and subdued and didn't want to do anything very much except be cuddled. But then she started to lick her operation wound. I put the Cone of Shame on her, and she looked so miserable - she just stood there with her head hanging down and wouldn't move. The picture for which the phrase 'hangdog expression' was coined. I was scared to pull it too tight and so in the night she removed the thing for herself.

Her incision got infected and wasn't healing, so we went back to the Vet - who spoke to me, more in sorrow than in anger, as if I was a half-wit, and explained that if it doesn't heal it will split open and 'we don't want that do we'. So I hardened my heart and ignored Maisie's pitiful whines. The Lampshade of Doom is now on and will stay on permanently until Maisie's stitches are removed on Monday morning. Believe it or not, the picture above shows a Maisie who is relatively accustomed to the thing. She's a lot bouncier today and has been trying to chase sticks around the garden. The Cone does dig up a lot of extra earth and leaves and so on when she bends her head to sniff or grab a stick, but perhaps that adds to the fun.

It has shown me just how close to me she walks when I'm pottering about the house - I now have a hard plastic thing banging into my ankles with every step I take!

On a Monday morning

Let me tell you, I just love being retired! When you wake up to a sunny day, even though it's a Monday, you can just go out and get this - miles and miles of beach with hardly anyone else in sight. (It does help if you're also in a less populated country - there have to be some compensations for the cold weather, right?)

This is St Andrews West Sands this morning.

Maisie chased her ball and sniffed seaweed and chased her ball some more until she was completely exhausted.

She lay down and tried not to meet my eye, so I wouldn't throw the ball again. Result!

                                                                                               It was even warm enough to do without the woolly hat!!!! Shock!           

 

Getting a bit of sunshine and sand fairly sets you up for the boring old Tesco run at the beginning of a week.

Muddy boots

Hello!

At last the fields by the river have been grazed out and the cows and sheep moved elsewhere. Maisie and I had a lovely time re-aquainting ourselves with the river walk yesterday. Can you see her barrelling along towards me? Oh, the smells and stories left by cows and sheep. What a happy dog.

It was, of course, a wellington boot occasion. The entire area is very wet anyway - it's beside a river, it's been raining copiously over the last few weeks and the fields have always shown a tendency to return to their original marshland status - however, grazing and trampling by stock adds a whole new dimension! The glaur by the gateways in particular was that sticky, deep, gloopy welly-boot-eating kind of mud that will divest the unwary walker of their footwear in just one unlucky pace. I trod very, very carefully, let me tell you!

Hopefully we'll have another day soon when it's not pelting down with rain and blowing a force nine gale so we can repeat the experience.

In other, far more important news, my incredibly talented daughter has just sent the final draft of her SECOND NOVEL - eeeeek!-- to her publisher, and it is available to pre-order here. Go! Fly my pretties to your e-book store and order this wondrousness now!

Boxing Day

Today was a beautiful bright calm day - a welcome change from the gale force winds we've had over the last couple of days.

We went for a walk - originally intending to go to Tentsmuir point - and starting out at Tayport. This is where the ferry used to leave from before the Tay bridge was built. You can see Dundee and Broughty Ferry across the other side of the water.

We'd thought that this end of the Tentsmuir sands might be slightly less full of dogs, because Maisie is in season (She's not a puppy any more - at least, not physically - mentally she's still 3 months old!). However, when we got to the start of the coastal path there was a team of huskies being exercised. Yikes! We couldn't let poor Maisie off the lead there, so retraced our steps back to the harbour. Still, it was quiet on the foreshore and we let her roam about there while we looked for interesting pebbles. The mouth of the Tay is a great place to find all sorts of stones including agates and jasper, because the river carries such a huge volume of water and washes stuff down from beyond the Highland Boundary Fault.

The foreshore in winter is also a splendid place for birdwatching. There were lots of busy wading birds - redshank, greenshank, curlew, turnstone, sanderling and oystercatchers. So we had a lovely time watching them poking about in the seaweed and mud. A nice walk,  even though Maisie didn't get her usual mad dash about.

This picture of her is from last week, on the sands at St. Andrews. She loves the beach.

 

Summer comes October

The green becomes the brown.

The leaves will all be red and gold before they touch the ground.

Oh before they touch the ground my dear, before they touch the ground,

The long and lonely winter will be here.

Those lovely words are from a song by our old friend Dave Goulder, and we are always conscious of this time of year being all too fleeting. So when there was a promise of a sunny day on Thursday, we headed off to Aberfeldy to have a walk in the Birks.

Maisie made such a fuss on the way up here in the car that we very nearly stopped at Dunkeld for our walk instead, but we persevered, and I'm so glad we did.

The Birks are lovely at any time of year, but just now they are positively glorious. Red and gold indeed.

 

 

 

There has been lots of rain lately, so the waterfall was at its spectacular best.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There were rain clouds around and the sun on them gave that lovely shining pewter cast to the sky which makes such a great backdrop to autumn leaves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once you have climbed up to the top of the gorge and crossed the bridge above the waterfall, you make your way back down the other side to the bottom, where there are lovely mossy banks by the river.

 

Maisie had a lovely time, with other dogs to say hello to, precipices to peer over (and frighten us with), smells to investigate and leaves to snuffle. It's a decent length of walk, so she was peaceful and absolutely quiet in the car on the way home.

[If anyone out there has the cure for a wee dog who does the equivalent of 'Are we there yet, mummy?' continuously on all outward journeys, I'd be pleased to hear from you!]

Anyway, I'm glad we made it here and grabbed some late sunshine and gorgeous colour.

'The braes ascend like lofty wa's,
The foaming stream deep-roaring fa's,
O'erhung wi' fragrant spreading shaws-
The birks of Aberfeldy.' As Rabbie Burns put it.

I commend it to you.

Windswept

Hello there.

The weather has suddenly become decidedly autumnal. There's a chill wind from the North bringing somewhat mixed weather.

Maisie and I have been searching for new places to go for walks, since the fields by the river are now full of livestock. We can play in the park and walk downtown for the paper, but for a Proper Walk we now need to hop in the car and go somewhere nearby.

Today we explored the Lomonds. Don't be confused, these are nothing to do with Ben Lomond and Loch Lomond over in the west of Scotland. No, these are our very own Fife hills, which can be seen for miles around because they're the only things poking up from a large fertile plain. We started at East Lomond and skirted the west side of it because that has a path with dry stane dykes on either side so I could let Maisie off the lead in safety - you never know when you're going to meet a sheep out on the open moor.

It was very windy and quite chilly and we had the place to ourselves, even though it was a Sunday afternoon in the middle of the school half-term. Maisie loved all the new smells - she gets very excited when the wind blows - perhaps she can smell messages coming in from miles away.

We walked over to the foot of the West Lomond and back again.

They are very shapely hills. They are volcanic plugs rising through an earlier igneous sill which is overlaid on the country sandstone and limestone. The Lomonds mark the end of the coal-bearing seams which lie in the south of Fife, and provide a demarcation between the predominantly agricultural and fishing based economy of the North East of Fife and the  more industrial South and West of the county (or Kingdom, as it likes to be called!)

There are many who see the Lomonds as a social demarcation line too, but that's all a little more emotive so we won't go into that.

This is the West Lomond. A handsome chap, I'm sure you'll agree. You can distinctly see the 'shoulders' which are the igneous sill, with the pap rising through the middle.

We had a bracing hour's walk and got back to the car just as the clouds thickened and the rain began to fall.

What on earth???

Hello.

Today Maisie and I enjoyed the September sunshine on our usual river walk. It was a beautiful day, but the sun also served to emphasize that the farmer who owns these fields is doing some Very Strange Things.

You can see in this picture (looking over towards East Lomond hill) the beginnings of a flat bit of bare earth. This is the tail end of a piece of inscrutable earth moving that has been going on all the way round the field nearest to town. It's not putting in field drains, or mending fences, or grubbing up hedges to make a bigger field - it's just a big, flat scraped out ribbon of earth plus resulting earth mound all along the edge of the river and over to the mill lade at the other side of the field. It is certainly not pretty - see?                                             

The little bridge, by the way, goes over to a lane up into town called Coo Brae, and it was where the cows were brought over from this field up to the dairy that used to be there.

We need more walks in and around the fields and through the town, not less and less. Down with Random Digging say I!

 

Roaches and runner beans

Hello there.

We had last weekend away visiting Number One Son. The weather forecast was gloomy, but the reality was not.

Manchester Craft and Design Centre provided a splendid Saturday lunchtime mooching around looking at and buying of lovely gorgeous things, followed by a visit to Tatton Park, where our search for a cup of tea and a scone before wandering round the gardens was rewarded in The Gardeners Cottage Cafe by the worst service I have ever encountered. They showed us to our table and then all 6 of the waiting staff on duty ignored us for half an hour. We left. The gardens are nice though.

On Sunday, since the weather forecasters had proved themselves to be Jeremiahs on Saturday, we decided to Go For A Walk Anyway. What a good decision.

Not far from the flat boring expanses of Cheshire, proper country begins (as soon as you cross into any of the neighbouring counties in fact). Just into Staffordshire are the lovely jagged bluffs of The Roaches. Gritstone escarpments rising above the Goyt valley. The splendid photos are courtesy of No.1 Son. There is also a deep and mysterious chasm, Lud's Church, formed by an old landslip. It's very green and damp, full of atmosphere and liverworts. We had a lovely walk down to it and back.

Next time we visit we'll go up on the ridge and take in more of the panoramic views, but by the time we'd returned to the car we were sorely in need of lunch. The Roaches Tearooms did us proud.

A lovely place with many varied walks. I commend  it to you.

Before we set off to return home, No.1 Daughter -in-Law offered us some runner beans from her garden. Hah! I declined, because I knew that in the 3 short days we'd been away our runner beans would have burgeoned - because that's what they do. They're setting, they're tiny, then Kapow! Masses of mega bean pods. Every gardener everywhere at this season of the year is giving Beans to the Neighbours!

Here's what greeted us on our return home. We'll be having beans with everything for the next week or so.

By the way, we didn't take Maisie with us on this trip because we went by train. Instead our lovely gorgeous daughter and family had a wee holiday in our house. Maisie apparently behaved beautifully and the grandchildren gave her lots of playtime.

I guess they gave her lots of 'on the sofa' time too, because she does seem much more eager to jump up on my knee as soon as I sit down than she ever was before. Hmmm.