Caithness Holiday Day 4: when a forest is not a wood

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Sometimes I have to tell it like it is. Dunnet Forest is one of the least pleasant collections of trees I’ve ever had the displeasure of walking through. From start to finish, a total misuse of the land.

Within 50yd of the carpark are multiple signs warning owners to pick up after their dogs and to use the bin, even with the emotional manipulation that excrement left around could blind a child.

The woodland itself is awful – monoculture spruce with barren lack of undergrowth.

The only burn I saw was a stretch of ~70yd of stagnant scum-covered sludge, vibrant orange with industrial pollution.

There is a reek of unjust hypocrisy about the whole affair: one cannot help but think, even if there is some credibility in the idea of a small kid putting something off the forest floor in their eye, by surface area and decay-rate alone, they would be far more likely to encounter danger in the polluted stream than from anything left behind by a dog – which would, if anything, go some way to re-fertilizing the abused ground beneath the trees.

Toward the end of the ill-defined loop route are several sculptures carved out of the remains of some of the tree trunks. You’ll have had yer entertainment then – but not your walk in nature.

I could not escape fast enough.

Caithness Holiday Day 3: Strathnaver and Strathmore are not Caithness

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As the weather dictated, a slight detour from the east coast away out to the centre and west of the top of Scotland. I explored the road down Strathnaver, starting with a small church at Syre (a distinctive tin-tab construction originally built by the Free Church of Scotland as a mission to nearby Sutherland estate, but now joined to the Church of Scotland since 1929):

Having been there last autumn, the view from the head of Loch Naver was just as compelling (and just as windy)

A wide-angle panorama from the head of Loch Naver

A few hundred yards north of Altnaharra a small road leads off through Strathmore, passing some beautiful landscape scenes of Ben Loyal across Loch Meadie:

Further along, I discovered a beautiful but thought-provoking view: at Allnabad, a former shepherd’s house, now ruined and roofless, looks out over a barren landscape over the length of Strath Coir an Easaidh to beautiful undulating mountains beyond. Unusually for me, I made quite significant changes to the scene – the real lighting was strongly blue-green (a very Fuji summer landscape colour palette) but it works better with hints of relative colour beneath a pale sepia wash for a classic old-time look. (I’ve also slightly moved the small pile of stones relative to the building.) The resultant photo is called “The Story”, partly as a homage to the Runrig song of the same name, partly because of the sense of time – evolution of the land on geological and sociological timescales.

Continuing north up Strathmore, I found the remains of the broch at Dun Dornaigil – conveniently built beside the road 😉 – on a lovely sunny day, just had to fly the drone up where a location a bit downstream made an excellent composition of river leading to the broch and Ben Hope in the distance.

From there we drove up to the far north coast and followed the A836 east, keeping an eye on the landscape to the south. Ben Loyal makes an unmistakable outline with its four peaks; somewhere nearer to Tongue there was a convenient layby giving a comparatively clear view across to the mountain.

Caithness Holiday Day 2: Whaligoe Steps and Camster Cairns

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Many moons ago… the parents and I were on holiday around Caithness and having trouble finding the way to Whaligoe Steps. As his tractor turned by the end of the field, we stopped a farmer to ask directions. To southern ears, the instructions sounded memorably like “turn right at the fussky-osk”. With a little thought we established the meaning… and twenty-two years later I still remember the turn of phrase and was pleased to identify the first phone-box in this Spring’s return visit.

Whaligoe Steps themselves are 365 steps down the side of a steep cliff to a former port for offloading herring boats; women would gut the fish and carry it up in barrels.

The place itself is quite an impressive geo with a fault nearby in the rock – strata lines pushed up by thrust – and pleasant views out to sea.

Further down the road are Camster Cairns – quite impressively large piles of rocks with interior chambers, perhaps the oldest buildings in Scotland at 5000yr old.

It had been another ludicrously hot day, with temperatures up over 25-28ºC, so we finished the day’s explorations on the north coast at the Slates of Fulligoe in East Mey, where the setting sun was partially obscured by a thick sea haar – very pleasantly cool.

 

This was the second evening I’d set out to make a timelapse of the sunset into dusk. At least this time I was prepared for haar coming in off the sea (chose a safer less-cliff-top location near the path back, for starters). It did not disappoint: over the course of an hour the sun moved, the waves came and went, and a huge bank of fog moved in transforming the scene from brilliant sunset reflecting on the water, to complete white-out. All the possible moods of the landscape in barely an hour – quite awesome.
This photo is a temporal flattening of a timelapse sequence – using the intervalometer to shoot HDR brackets 3*±1EV at regular intervals which can be made either into a timelapse video or averaged-out into a still, like this. (The sun itself is blended from fewer images to avoid motion blur.)

Autumn at the Hermitage

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I spent a happy several hours wandering around The Hermitage by Dunkeld over the weekend, taking in very much the end of nature’s autumn displays – tree foliage fallen and fading, the light dull overcast all afternoon (and mostly raining, at that).

First, a few conventional scenes beside the River Braan and the Black Linn waterfalls from the bridge, as one does:

From there I explored a new direction away from the river, up through the Craigvinean woods to the Pine Cone viewpoint. The weather descended – from bright sunshine strolling through the colourful larches, it turned completely dreich grey and mist arose from the trees reducing visibility to barely 50yd. Quite spooky 🙂

On the way back, a particular beech tree caught my attention; with a bit of work, the 18mm prime revealed a particularly strong composition, illustrating the tree’s curving trunk. An unusual use for focus-stacking, too: it was so dark when I started the sequence, the camera was at 30s, ISO 400 even at f/2.0; by the time I finished 8 minutes layer, it was completely pitch black night.

 

 

The Annoyance of Greenpeace

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These trees are no longer standing either

For a couple of years now, I have followed Greenpeace UK on Facebook. From what I can see, their environmentally friendly missions and aims are generally laudable.

But I am having a big problem with their methods. Here are three topics about which they have posted from the last year:

There’ll soon be more plastic in the sea than fish
What I approve of: the implicit attempt to reduce plastic pollution – not even just because it works its way back up the foodchain, but because no animal should suffer anywhere
What I disapprove of: the sensationalist attention-grabbing and meaningless headline – do they mean: by count; by mass; by volume?

Tell Volkswagen to stop making diesel cars now!
What I approve of: the move toward sustainable, ie electric, transport. I even had an electric car earlier in the year, and am just waiting on one that goes somewhere other than 20mi to Stirling.
What I disapprove of: the sensationalist attention-grabbling headline; the complete failure to mention that VW have had electric cars available for years (eGolf; various GTE hybrids), having increased the number of models around the group (Audi e-tron, etc) and are committed to producing increasing numbers in the next few years (the forthcoming I.D. range, some of which are quite interesting).

“From chocolate to toothpaste, these everyday products could contain #DirtyPalmOil. Time to tell companies to stop forest destruction”
What I approve of: preserving forestry, especially native tree species
What I disapprove of: the attention-grabbing headline; the complete failure to mention that Colgate-Palmolive (the “toothpaste” company indicted in the above) do not list palm oil in their ingredients and already have policies in place for “no deforestation” and specifically for sustainable behaviour regarding palm oil including along their supply chain.

A person blindly following their calls to action would at best have wasted their time on either writing some kind of letter or, even less fruitfully, a “petition”; at worst when the company refutes the argument, they’d rightly feel like a fool.

It seems the Greenpeace Method is to selectively ignore half the facts and present a logically fallacious appeal to emotion.

That’s a dishonesty I cannot support, so I’m out.