Fork

image

After a morning of walking the dog into the village and back (0.8mi either way) and digging over yet another vegetable bed, I’m about as knackered as this old fork the previous occupants left in the garden (presumably as an object of art, that being an excuse for quite a lot of things…).

Cliffs

image

Taken at the foot of the Southern Upland Way climbing out of Portpatrick Harbour, looking down on a passing jackdaw to rocks below.

Tidying up

image

Last weekend’s bonfire resulted in more than a wheelbarrow full of ash, some of which went in the compost; burning the wooden rubbish the previous occupants left over the bank garden fence resulted in several nails and screws lurking in the ash. Still, no physics geek would be complete without a magnet – make that a big magnet – it made a great job of lifting hidden metal detritus.

Bluebell

image

I guess they’ll be coming to an end soon – but it’s been a good year for enjoying bluebells by the carpet-load in the local woods.

Lenticular Clouds

image

This particular shape of cloud normally requires mountains or hills in order to form, so I was mildly surprised to see a couple of examples of lenticular clouds near Portpatrick yesterday evening – Galloway not being noted for having any hills to speak of, least of all to the north west of here where the wind was coming from.

image

Water, water, everywhere

Saturday was wet. Very wet.

This was the view just outside Portpatrick, at the corner of the Dunskey B-road turnoff, water flooding off the hill onto the road.

Flood

On arriving home, I discovered a drain outside the gate was unable to cope with the sudden rain, and a gutter-load of water was flowing in a channel down the driveway, pushing gravel through the gate.

It took half an hour’s shovelling gravel to persuade some of the water to flow into a flowerbed the other side of the fence; in the meantime, the garage was flooded about 3in deep.

A couple of days later and the scale of damage caused is clear; while the driveway is now arguably better than it was before, roadside embankments have obviously suffered

Collapsed embankment

as has the road surface – the erosion from gravel and dirt flowing over tarmac is quite severe:

tarmac road surface showing serious erosion due to