On Tuesday Liz and I reluctantly returned home from a fabulous holiday in the southwest of Britain - a week on the Isles of Scilly, plus a few days in the far west of Cornwall.
We were very lucky with the weather. Although Bank Holiday Monday was a total wash-out, we had more than our fair share of blue skies and warm sunshine. At times the weather was so good that it felt more like the Mediterranean than the British Isles!
Whilst we were staying in Ullapool we took a trip to the Summer Isles, a cluster of small islands where the sheltered waters of Loch Broom meet the open sea.
A few people live on Tanera Mòr, the largest of the Summer Isles, but the rest of the archipelago is inhabited only by seals and sea birds.
Tanera Mòr has a post office and café, which cater mainly for the needs of visiting day trippers. The post office produces its own stamps to cover the cost of transporting mail to Achiltibuie, the nearest village on the mainland, where it is collected by the Royal Mail.
There's a bit of a debate about the possible links between the Summer Isles and 'Summerisle', the fictional setting for the 1973 cult movie The Wicker Man. All I can say with certainty is that Lord Summerisle was not in residence during our visit.
An empty road snaking through a wild, rugged landscape is a frequently used image in car adverts.
Sutherland has many miles of spectacular roads, which I'm sure have featured in many car ads. The section of the A894 between Skiag Bridge and Unapool seemed to be particularly familiar.
Of course, for the vast majority of drivers, the open road is a complete fantasy. They are fated to spend their time crawling along congested city streets and featureless motorways.
For the second week of our holiday we rented a cottage by Loch Culag, about a mile south of Lochinver on a quiet back road. It was an exceptionally tranquil spot. Much of the time, all you could hear were natural sounds: birdsong, the wind in the trees, the gentle patter of rain... and the bleating of lambs (which, I have to admit, started to get on my nerves after a while!).
I find that the older I get, the more I value tranquillity. The trouble is that it's a dwindling resource in our stress-packed world.
Much as I love walking in the Peak District National Park, it can be difficult to get away from the sound of people and traffic. Compared to Sutherland, it is as crowded as a shopping mall! We were amazed at how few other walkers we met, even on the most popular routes. Mountain bikers were conspicuously absent too.
Apart from a couple ear-splitting sorties by low-flying military jets, we hardly noticed any aircraft over Sutherland. In contrast, the skies over the Peak District are some of the most congested in Europe.
Now that the National Park is ringed by busy international airports (Manchester, East Midlands, Leeds Bradford, Robin Hood, etc), it is continuously criss-crossed by airliners. A few years ago I heard that a local landscape photographer had given up working in the Peak District because of the ever-present contrails.
There's also a lot of low-level air traffic over the Peak District, which can be very intrusive. It's a particular problem in the Upper Derwent Valley where there's often a succession of helicopters and light aircraft following the route of the Dambusters training runs.
In the first week of our holiday we spent time at another blissfully tranquil spot: Lochan Mor on the Rothiemurchus estate, near Aviemore. It's one of my favourite locations on Speyside and holds very special memories.
However, the tranquillity of Rothiemurchus will be shattered later this month when the estate plays host to The Outsider festival. According to the publicity spiel:
"The Outsider is all about celebrating the good things we enjoy from the land and showing respect for our environment. So naturally we’re encouraging people to be as green and environmentally aware as possible."
Take it from me, there is nothing environmentally aware about thousands of people congregating in a field to listen to rock music.
This afternoon Liz and I arrived back home in Sheffield after a two week break in the Scottish Highlands. Our first stop was Inverdruie on Speyside, before heading north to Ullapool. We then spent the whole of the second week exploring Assynt in the far north-west.
After six weeks of more or less dry, warm and sunny weather in Sheffield, it was a bit of a shock to find Speyside cold, grey and damp with a fresh fall of snow covering the tops of the Cairngorms.
It turned out be a real 'four season' holiday, serving up a smorgasbord of all the delights the British climate can offer: sun, rain, hail, snow, wind, etc.
I'll write more about our trip over the next few days.
Suilven viewed from the west
See the location of Suilven on an aerial photo.
Yesterday evening Liz and I took the bold step of booking the accommodation for a holiday in Assynt this May.
We spent a couple of weeks in Assynt in September 1998. The scenery is absolutely stunning: isolated mountains of Torridonian sandstone are scattered across a rolling landscape of ancient Lewisian Gneiss. One of my favourite landscape photos is a winter panorama of this region by Colin Prior. He makes it look like a cold, wet version of the Monument Valley.
So, we've decided to return to Assynt... and this time we're determined to get to the top of Suilven. Now I have just four months to get myself fit enough!
The beach at Achmelvich
See roughly where this picture was taken.
Last Friday Liz and I had a guided tour of the new Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood. Visitors are not permitted to take photographs in the working parts of the building, but I did manage to get a few shots of the public areas.
Strictly speaking, Holyrood is an assemblage of interconnected structures rather a single building. Seen from above, the structures are said to resemble leaves on a branch or boats in a harbour. Either way, the parliament site is positively labyrinthine in its complexity!
Some elements of Holyrood, such as the debating chamber (see photo above) and the garden lobby are superbly designed. We were also shown one of the committee rooms, which has excellent acoustics and the beautiful simplicity of a Highland chapel.
Other parts of the complex are rather poorly designed. As you approach on foot from Canongate and the Royal Mile, the public entrance is hidden from view - tucked away round a corner. Once inside, the foyer and exhibition areas are dingy and uninviting. The landscaping on the eastern side of the site is also pretty uninspiring, but maybe it will improve with age.
There has been a lot of controversy about the 'runaway' cost of the parliament building: £431,000,000 and counting. However, that's still £358,000,000 cheaper than the defunct Millennium Dome and peanuts compared to the cost of Blair's military escapades in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I actually like the feeling that 'no expense has been spared' on the Scottish Parliament - it gives a sense that it is both valued and here to stay.
Yesterday Liz and I got back from an extended weekend break in Northumberland. The weather was great, so we did some very long walks along the coast. We also had a day trip to Edinburgh (more of that later).
The Northumberland coast is very varied. It has some of the UK's best beaches, plus rocky scars, low cliffs, salt marshes, mudflats and dune systems.
The coast is teeming with bird life at this time of year. We saw huge flocks of lapwings and golden plovers on the mudflats near the mouth of the River Coquet. Eiders are very abundant all along the coast; they feed in the harbours at Craster, Seahouses and Amble. We also saw some impressive skeins of brent geese near Alnmouth.
We noticed a steady southward movement of smaller birds along the coast, including skylarks, reed buntings and a few late wheatears (probably the last we'll see this year).
We also saw several large flocks of linnets on the rocky shores between Howick and Craster, but we couldn't work out what they were feeding on.
Whilst we were visiting western Cornwall last month, Liz and I stayed in a cottage on the outskirts of St Just in Penwith.
When we first visited St Just in the late 1980s, it seemed a rather grim and depressed place. The tin mining industry, traditionally St Just's main source of employment, was in terminal decline. Like many other mining communities around the UK, the town was being victimised by a government that believed "unemployment is a price worth paying" and regarded militant mineworkers as "the enemy within".
Since then, thankfully, St Just has undergone a revival. The town now seems to be prospering once more, partly because it has become popular with tourists as a base for exploring the Land's End peninsula. It is also home to a thriving colony of artists. Another indication of St Just's changed fortunes is the brand new extension that has been added to the primary school - surely a positive sign!
In September we were delighted to discover that the former mining area around St Just has been included in the new Cornish Mining World Heritage Site. It joins a select group of 830 properties around the globe which the World Heritage Committee considers to have "outstanding universal value". Other World Heritage Sites in the UK include Stonehenge, the Tower of London and Kew Gardens.
Looking at the scenic ruins of the old mine buildings, it is hard to imagine that the wild and rugged Cornish coast was once a seat of heavy industry. The mines produced not only tin, copper and other metals but also arsenic, much of which was exported to the USA where it was used as an insecticide in the cotton-fields.
Working in the mines and ore-processing plants must have been hellish. Accounts from the 18th and 19th centuries describe the dreadful conditions in which men, women and children toiled.
Much of the land between Levant and Geevor still appears to be heavily contaminated with mining waste, but elsewhere nature has healed the industrial scars. I find it reassuring that, given time, even the most despoiled areas can become green once more. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the rare red-billed chough can now be seen amongst the ruined mine buildings near Botallack.
