In general, lacking high pointy mountains, Angus always strikes me as one of the less dramatic parts of the country. However, I’ve visited the Lunan Bay area a few times and it makes a good escape for an afternoon.
There’s quite a nice beach…
Pebbles amongst sand
Decaying lump of tree bark on sand
A small floral life-form amongst the pebbles and sand.
Signs on a shed on the weay to Lunan Bay beach
Sweeping leading lines – where the Lunan Water meets the sea
Beach details: dead tree trunks/branches embedded in the sand, pointing at a hut amongst the dunes.
and the ruins of Red Castle stand out stark sandstone against blue skies – ideal with high-flying cirrus cloud in the background.
Pleasantly contrasty light illuminating the castle ruins, against a dramatic cloudy sky.
Pleasantly contrasty light illuminating the castle ruins, against a dramatic cloudy sky.
Quite an impressive ruined castle atop a small hill.
Mouth of the Lunan Water outflow through the beach below Red Castle.
It also looks quite good from the air.
Red Castle, Lunan Bay
Red Castle, Lunan Bay
Floor plans
Lunan Water
Estuary
Red Castle, Lunan Bay
And finally, I’m experimenting with a different art form – composite overlays, controlling visual information by selectively retaining structures. Essence of Lunan in one.
Composite: various aspects of an afternoon spent at Lunan Bay blended together.
For the second day of my holiday last Autumn, I got up – again! – at a ludicrously early hour and drove from Tongue round to the Assynt peninsula, to my favourite viewpoint for sunrise.
It was some drive.
All the way from Tongue to Loch Assynt without seeing another car. Bliss.
Take the A838 road (abused as part of the ghastly NC500 coastal route) via Durness at 5am in the pitch black, the wind blowing a gale, rain + windscreen wipers on full speed.
Picture avoiding a herd cows intruding across the road. Avoiding more than 10 deer.
At that surreal pre-caffeinated hour of the morning, seeing a signpost advertising “serving local seafood” makes me picture a restaurant waiter taking a scallop’s order at table. The music of choice was Arcade Fire Mountains beyond Mountains – a song bemoaning city life with its world so small – a mental image contrasting with my surroundings, passing rural Scourie, pop 132 – the sort of place that takes longer to say the name than drive through.
And so I arrived at Rhicarn – the landscape black, clouds a grey plasma, just a little bit windy…
And the sun rose. Quite spectacularly, casting brilliant crepuscular rays from the horizon and underside edges of clouds.
A brilliant display of crepuscular rays, shadows coming from the edge of a cloud as the sun rose beside Canisp.
Beautiful morning light: crepuscular rays streaming from a cloud edge, illuminating the sides of Suilven and Canisp and the Manse Loch in the foreground.
A thick cloud obscured the freshly risen sun – its edges casting crepuscular rays over the hazy landscape.
Autumn at my favoured viewpoint, Rhicarn in Assynt.
A thick cloud obscured the freshly risen sun – its edges casting crepuscular rays over the hazy landscape.
Autumn at my favoured viewpoint, Rhicarn in Assynt.
Loch Uidh a’Chliabhain and the Manse Loch in the foreground; beautiful receding layers of mountains in the middle; a stunning dramatic display of crepuscular rays as a cloud obscured the rising sun in the distance.
Projection: Rectilinear (0)
FOV: 23 x 16
Ev: 11.38
Loch Uidh a’Chliabhain and the Manse Loch in the foreground; beautiful receding layers of mountains in the middle; a stunning dramatic display of crepuscular rays as a cloud obscured the rising sun in the distance.
Projection: Rectilinear (0)
FOV: 23 x 16
Ev: 11.38
Throughout the sunrise, the light was spectacular – brightly illuminating colourful clouds.
Simple abstract patterns: bright early morning sunlight illuminating clouds a warm yellow/orange.
…and casting a subtle hazy glow over the morning fog across Little Assynt, outlines of hills receding into the mist
As the sun rose, the ground heated just enough for the overnight dew to evaporate into a thick fog, filling the landscape enough to obscure the receding lines of hills into nothing but a bright haze beside the sun.
Manse Loch / Loch Uidh a’Chliabhain remains clear, a mile into the foreground.
Iconic Scottish landscape: the Manse Loch and layers of hills and mountains receding into the hazy distance
Perhaps my favourite image from the morning has to be Suilven, the unmistakable mountain on the horizon, catching a subtle patch of oblique sunlight on a flank.
The unmistakable shape of Suilven (Sùilebheinn) catching an oblique beam of warm early morning sunlight.
Once the sun rose, I explored the Falls of Kirkaig outside Inverkirkaig. A nice long walk through lumpy landscape, to a large thundering waterfall.
Undulating landscape; gneiss outcrops amongst the grass and heather beside the path above the River Kirkaig gorge.
An impressive waterfall – 60ft tall and flowing deep and fast into its splash-pool below.
It’s also one of the scariest places I’ve been in a landscape; this view is from a small platform area, a steep descent down the left face of the gorge. With my own dog for company there was limited space even to turn around and plant the tripod and camera bag.
As if the river Kirkaig wasn’t full and fast enough in the bottom of the gorge, walking back along the top the clouds were pretty dramatic, the light behind coming through as crepuscular rays above the silhouetted hills.
Returning to above Rhicarn, clouds had flowed in obscuring the mountains on the horizon, so I experimented flying the drone to admire the surrounding landscape.
There’s something about finding a thin strip of old tarmac that obviously used to be a road – it makes a connection with the story and heritage of a location. From researching on Pastmap, it appears there was not much road here at all throughout the 19th century – presumably a cattle drovers’ track or similar. Then the old tarmac was laid, following a circuitous path around the gneiss rock hills. Finally, some time after the 1960s, a new road, now the B869, was laid through it in a boring straight line, the old route relegated to a carpark yet visible and walkable either side of the road.
I suspect at one stage this might have been nothing more than a cattle drover’s track down to the lowlands, maybe up until the early 1900s; up to 1960 the road was just a thin narrow track of tarmac with a couple of moderately sharp twisty turns in. Since then the B869 has been rerouted into a simple and less inspiring straight line and the old road relegated to a path, some of it widened to form a carpark beside the new.
The bedrock is mostly Scourian gneiss, metamorphic, formed 2500-4000 million years ago (and therefore amongst the oldest rock to be found on the planet); down the centre of this view is a line of Lewisian metagabbro, gneissose, also metamorphic, formed 541-4000 million years ago.
I’m not sure what the large central depression might be – it looks rather like a quarry, although there’s no evidence of anything on the maps.
Behind this scene, on the way to Clachtoll, lies some beautiful Karst landscape (cnoc’n’lochan or knock-and-lochan), formed by underground erosion of softer rock, leading to a classic pattern of rocky knolls interspersed (almost 50-50 by area) with lochs.
The joys of knock-and-lochan Karst landscape: it’s almost all equal parts gneiss rocky outcrops and lochs with roads wending their way through the shapely landscape.
Further along the road lies the Maiden Loch, of which I’ve been very fond since first catching sight of it years ago. That first view was on a sunny afternoon, the sky blue reflecting in the water. I flew the drone over it, to admire the gneiss landscape all the more…
Fantastic scenery: Assynt at its very best. A very windy moment flying the drone above one of my favourite lochs, the Maiden Loch near Clachtoll.
The landscape is typical knock-and-lochan Karst formation: shaped by the dissolution of a layer or layers of soluble bedrock, small undulating gneiss hillocks emerge amongst the lochs.
In the hazy distance, Suilven cuts its familiar outline on the far horizon.
Some of the above photos are available on my photo gallery website: ShinyPhoto: Assynt
Can’t beat Scotland’s West Coast in summer. Saturday was spent exploring a new place to me, Smirisary in Glenuig, Lochaber.
A beach of large psammite outcrops with lyprophyre dykes
Cracks and sedimentary strata lines in an exposed lump of psammite, Smirisary.
Erosion in action: an exposed lump of psammite (metamorphosed former sandstone) showing lines of strata and cracks, with gentle folding, yet surrounded by stones and boulders where the sea has eroded it away.
Cracks and sedimentary strata lines in an exposed lump of psammite, Smirisary.
A perfect subject for an abstract art: dense close strata layers of psammite (mid/coarse-grained metamorphosed sandstone) tightly packed.
Signs of habitation – old (but possibly still in use) croft/houses just above the shore in amongst the caves
Signs of settlements – Smirisary forms a small cluster of houses down around the shoreline, nestling amongst the rocks.
Evidence of former habitation. Just because the west coast has its culture and traditions does not mean we should refrain calling out an example of litter for what it is in the context of environmental pollution.
Discarded metal bath-tub and other crap in a cave-mouth, Smirisary.
A beautiful beach – ideal for a paddle in the shallow seas with Dog – surrounded by rocky cliffs.
Beautiful landscapes – wide vistas via light on the sea out to the islands of Eigg and Rùm on the horizon
Sunlight playing on ferns in the foreground, looking out to the islands of Much, Eigg and Rum with their distinctive mountain outlines on the horizon.
Sky meets sea in an atmospheric haze of glowing light. Very ethereal.
Dramatic light: crepuscular rays emanating from dark clouds over the islands of Eigg and Rum across the water.
A variety of types of cloud billowing gently over the distinctive outlines of Eigg and Rum on the horizon.
And on the way back home we called in at Loch Eilt by the roadside – partly to wash the salt water out of the dog, but also to admire the symmetrical reflections. The midges were out in force, pesky and biting as ever, but the photos were worth it…
Pure green: Scots Pine trees on an island across Loch Eilt.
Pleasant clear and pure water. Shame about the hordes of midges – some flying so close to the lens I could see them larger than life on the live-view screen. A combination of long exposures sufficed to remove them, however – this is a combination of HDR (5*±0.7EV) and pixel-shift (4*1px offset) for optimal dynamic range and resolution.
Scots Pine trees on an island across Loch Eilt.Pleasant clear and pure water. Shame about the hordes of midges – some flying so close to the lens I could see them larger than life on the live-view screen. A combination of long exposures sufficed to remove them, however – this is a combination of HDR (5*±0.7EV) and pixel-shift (4*1px offset) for optimal dynamic range and resolution.
Some years ago I had a passing interest in the abstract shapes and forms rocks can take.
Recently I was out on the Aberdeenshire coast hunting photos with a friend, who, being impressed with the rocky coastline, wondered exactly where the Highland Boundary Fault emerged at its most north-eastern extremity.
After a bit of research (particularly exploring using the BGS‘s iGeology app), I tracked it to a small headland, Garron Point, beside the golf club outside Stonehaven.
From the outside it doesn’t look like much, but on closer inspection it is awesome.
There are actually two faults – a small one at the north-eastern end of Craigeven Bay corner with Garron Point, forming a small spur off the Highland Boundary Fault which clips the coastline from the town out to sea.
On the lowland side the bedrock is metabasalt, psammite and pelite (North Esk formation) – metamorphic bedrock formed around 461-485MYa in the Ordovician period. On the highland side is gritty psammite (Glen Lethnot grit formation) – around 541-1000MYa.
The fault itself can be tracked to a matter of a few feet – a view from beside one of the golf greens shows the junction of both faults, with a strip of incredibly deformed grey rock leading away some meters rather like a line of chewing-gum.
Some of the most impressive rock outcrops I know. Toward the top-right of the frame – those cliffs are tall, especially from below! – a small fault runs diagonally down to the spray of water and out the left side; from front to back, a line of deformed pale grey rock only a foot or two wide, twisted like chewing gum, marks the Highland Boundary Fault at its most narrow only metres away from its most north-eastern extremity on land, at Garron Point headland near Stonehaven.
The gnarly shapes of psammite (metamorphosed medium-grained grey former sandstone) and micro-basalt are awesome.
Prior to metamorphosis, this used to be sandstone. Now it forms a medium/coarse-grained rock, pale blue-green in colour, along the line of the Highland Boundary Fault.
This boulder marks the intersection of two fault lines; a small one, running diagonally from top-right to bottom-left, and the Highland Boundary Fault, running front to back.
The zoom lens has compressed perspective, but for a sense of scale, the foreground rock in the right is maybe 15-20′ away.
My favourite image is an abstract closeup – purply-red microbasalt meeting gritty blue-green psammite in a spray of cracks and marbling lines.
Perhaps the clearest view into the workings of the Highland Boundary Fault I can think of. On the left, red-purple microbasalt (its fine cuboidal structure putting me in mind of streaky thick bacon); elsewhere the blue-green-grey of psammite and pelite, medium- to fine-grained metamorphosed former sandstones. All jumbled together with fine cracks and lines of marble hinting at the pressures involved.
A year or so ago there had been a drone pilots’ meet-up on the shores of Loch Leven in Kinross. Late Tuesday afternoon showed indications from TPE3D and Windy suggesting the light would be pleasant, clipping the surrounding hills around sunset. Further alerts from Twitter reminded me of a partial lunar eclipse, with optimum effect around 2235hrs; again, checking TPE3D I saw the moon would rise in the ESE beside / over Benarty Hill across Loch Leven.
Arriving a little early, I hunted a composition: the obvious jetties by the carpark at the end of the road have locked gates, as does a track along the shore; walking further round, it’s obvious there’s scenery to be had but the path is surrounded by a 5′ hence making it incredibly frustrating to find a composition. In the end I settled for a “layby” with three concrete plinth benches, just tall enough to see over the hedge and just wide enough for the tripod legs.
With half an hour to kill before the lighting and lunar eclipse kicked-in, I flew the drone to survey the surroundings.
Loch Leven Castle remains and Bishop’s Hill in Fife from Kinross
Kinross House – symmetrical formal gardens, how ghastly.
Around 10pm the moon sneaked out from behind a cloud-bank over Benarty Hill, a perfect orange-red half-jaffa-cake in the Earth’s Shadow.
The last photo of the evening is still my favourite: can’t beat a few hazy clouds diffusing the glow of the still-red moon.
A few photos from Sunday afternoon’s explorations around Loch Rannoch.
We walked through the Black Woods; whilst flying the drone near Camghouran I discovered remains of a building – a pile of stones and hints of mounds in the earth possibly in the shape of a former but’n’ben croft? – in a clearing in the forest.
Walking along the path through the woods, one comes across this clearing just off to the south; quite photogenic from ground level, it becomes even more interesting from 100m up in the air as the beautiful pale tree is apparently stuck on the end of a pile of stome rubble, the remains of some kind of building.
The impressively tall fir trees of Camghouran / Croiscraig from above the Black Woods of Rannoch
I’ve been over 3000′ twice before now – but for one I stopped short of the summit, and for the other we took the ski-lift up, so neither really counts as Munro-bagging.
In the Christmas/New-Year holiday week, friends and I spent a happy day climbing Schiehallion – a mountain we’ve known and photographed for a long time, but actually climbing it was a first, at least for some of us.
We couldn’t have asked for better conditions: fresh but basically dry, all the way up with mist blowing around the summit.
The top third is a tricky scramble over large boulders, but the view was totally worth it – my first Munro, my first glory and Brocken Spectre all in one.
Glory and Brocken Spectre, Schiehallion. Awesome!
On the way down we paused to admire the surroundings – an interplay of light, mist, undulating lochs and landscape and more mountains.
Views found whilst descending Schiehallion: abstract patterns of large white fluffy clouds catching the sunlight.
Hints of misty cloud blowing gently away across the landscape.
Views found whilst descending Schiehallion: abstract patterns of large white fluffy clouds catching the sunlight.
Sunlit Rockery
Views found whilst descending Schiehallion: abstract patterns of large white fluffy clouds catching the sunlight.
Views found whilst descending Schiehallion: abstract patterns of large white fluffy clouds catching the sunlight.
Bring on the mountains – I have climbing to be doing 🙂
Saturday’s involved driving much of the length of the A9 from Perthshire to Inverness and beyond to the Nice Place™, and back down again.
On the return, I broke the journey in two locations I’ve previously admired but never stopped at: one, outside Bunchrew outside Inverness, to admire the clear view along the river estuary to the Kessock Bridge:
Many years ago I made a photo of this bridge spanning the river mouth from the shores much closer in Inverness. Since then the road along the south of the river out of the city has become a favourite drive, with its easy straights, gentle bends and occasional views back to the Kessock Bridge in the distance.
Many years ago I made a photo of this bridge spanning the river mouth from the shores much closer in Inverness. Since then the road along the south of the river out of the city has become a favourite drive, with its easy straights, gentle bends and occasional views back to the Kessock Bridge in the distance.
Odd: I’ve lived around Perthshire for over a decade and driven this stretch of the A9 many many times, but never explored Ruthven Barracks before. I was fortunate enough to arrive just as the moon was rising in the north-east – a lot larger by eye than it appeared in the photos, but it made a good backdrop to the ruined buildings. Otherwise, in the cold late afternoon light, the ground covered in a dusting of snow, it all looked rather bleak…
A view from behind the well-known Ruthven Barracks ruin looking straight up the Inshes along the River Spey to the moon rising in the distance.
Classic use for a drone – fling it up and over a ruin and admire the former Ruthven Barracks innards from on high.
Ruthven Barracks, near Kingussie, Speyside.
For a final subject, just as I was packing up the drone to leave Ruthven Barracks, I noticed a splash of soft light on very low clouds clipping the Cairngorm mountains in the distance. Long lens; click; got it.
No eagles found flying this day – but the distant gorge is on Creag na h’Iolaire in the Cairngorms.
An interesting photo to make – I had been standing beside the road, flying the drone around the adjacent ruins, when I spotted the low cloud and soft light in the distance. On closer inspection, one can just about make out the snow-covered slopes of the adjacent a’Chailleach peeking through the cloud.
No eagles found flying this day – but the distant gorge is on Creag na h’Iolaire in the Cairngorms.
An interesting photo to make – I had been standing beside the road, flying the drone around the adjacent ruins, when I spotted the low cloud and soft light in the distance. On closer inspection, one can just about make out the snow-covered slopes of the adjacent a’Chailleach peeking through the cloud.
I used to make a point of closeup nature photos, simplifying the complexity of plant structure down to a few lines, in dull light. For the first time in ages, I spent most of yesterday afternoon with just the old Helios 58mm lens attached, walking around, seeing what could be seen. Didn’t expect ladybirds to feature at this time of year.
Detail of broom seedpods
Tree structure
A cluster of ladybirds in a broom bush twig junction
We made it up to the Rannoch area mid-afternoon in time to admire the pure calm stillness and misty distant mountain reflections on Loch Rannoch.
Beautiful simplicity: flat calm, mirror reflections on Loch Rannoch.
(Obligatory plug – the above image is now uploaded to my main fine-art / landscape website: Blue Stillness, Loch Rannoch.)
Drone photos also happened – flying around inversion layers over the Black Woods of Rannoch.
Patches of mist above Loch Rannoch near Croiscraig / Camghouran.
..then we went for a stroll underneath all that mist, too.
And the forest was its usual welcoming self, albeit in subdued winter mode:
Black Woods of Rannoch late in the day – hints of mist rising in the distance, colours turned cool.
It’s interesting how this end of the Black Woods is so much more densely planted – even though the Scots Pine is a native species, it’s still not naturally evolved. Indeed the history of the Black Woods includes attempts to log the forest – one can only presume this was an attempt to replant, with native species, but still with some potential degree of profit in mind.
A couple of weeks ago in the middle of December, we were treated to a quick overnight blast of snow. It remains my favourite season for photography, so I staggered up Birnam Hill to fly in the late afternoon light.
Landscapes:
Snow-capped hills either side of the Highland Boundary Fault line – catching the last warm rays of sunset in the distance.
Snow-capped hills either side of the Highland Boundary Fault line – catching the last warm rays of sunset in the distance.
Straight-down abstracts – trees and outlines of the Birnam Burn flowing through the snow:
Wiggly shapes – the Birnam Burn running down past Stare Bridge viewpoint.
Wiggly shapes – the Birnam Burn running down past Stare Bridge viewpoint.
Ground-level tree abstracts:
Detail of tree twigs and filigree – lichen-covered branches silhouetted against the low winter sun.
Detail of tree twigs and filigree – lichen-covered branches silhouetted against the low winter sun.
As an experiment to help learn my way around the Shotcut video editor, I made a short video of the area too:
The old ShinyPhoto website was getting a bit long in the tooth. It saw several versions of Python come and go and increasingly suffered from bitrot. (Notably, a mutual incompatibility in the CGI module between python versions; it ran for so long the backend storage engine I used became deprecated with no easy way out but to revert to one I wrote myself – not a good reason to rely on third-party libraries!)
So, for the past couple of months I’ve been learning my way around Javascript and node.js and have replaced the site with a new gallery to show-off my photos.
Being me, it’s a bit geeky. With web-design there are so many angles to consider, but here are a few aspects that stick in the mind:
Technical: no XSLT; this is the first time in nearly 20 years where I’ve used a different templating language – in this case, Mustache since it does need to be able to produce non-HTML data as well.
Learning: there’s a whole ecosystem of node.js packages (NPMs) that have come in handy, from the Express webserver to image-resizing utilities (some of which are faster than others!).
Data: in my more professional work capacity I deal with data-storage on a daily basis, so it has some passing interest. One of the problems with the old site was its inability to extract metadata from images; because this instance’s primary focus is the organization and display of photos, I decided that the JPEG should contain all the data displayed – title, description, geotagging, keywords all extracted from one upload and the less manual editing effort required, the better. Essentially, digiKam is both organizer and implicit website editor on my desktop.
Database: with the unit of data being the JPEG, presented as a page per photo, that maps well into a document-oriented model such as one of the NoSQL JSON-based databases. Unfortunately MongoDB disgraced themselves by choosing a non-open-source licence recently, so I was pleased to discover CouchDB – a modular system sharing protocols (JSON-over-HTTP(S)) and query language (MangoDB) across different storage backends with the advantage that I can start from the PouchDB pure node.js implementation but switch to an external version of the same with a quick data-replication later if need be. So far, it’s coping fine with 1.1GB of JPEG data (stored internally as attachments) and 70MB of log data.
Configurability: several aspects of the site are configurable, from the internal and external navigation menus to the cache-validity/timeout on images.
Scalable: my initial thought was to keep image-resizing pure-javascript and rely on nginx caching for speed; however, that would lose the ability to count JPEG impressions (especially thumbnails), so I switched to a mixed JS/C NPM and now resizing is sufficiently fast to run live. The actual node.js code itself also runs cleanly – feels very snappy in the browser after the old python implementation.
Metadata/SEO: the change of templating engine has meant specific templates can be applied to specific kinds of pages, rather than imposing one structure across the whole site; different OpenGraph and Twitter-Card metadata applies on the homepage, gallery and individual photo pages.
Statistics: lots of statistics. There are at least three aspects where statistics rule:
the usual analytics; it’s always handy to keep an eye on the most-popular images, external referrers, etc. The site uses its own application-level logging to register events on the page-impression scale, so the log data is queryable without having to dig through CLF webserver logs.
how should a photo gallery be sorted? By popularity, by date? Do thumbnails count? What about click-through rate? The new site combines all three metrics to devise its own score-function which is recalculated across all images nightly and forms the basis of a display order. (It surprises me that there are photo-galleries that expect people to choose the sort order by hand, or even present no obvious order at all.)
how should a photo-gallery be organized? My work is very varied, from bright colour to black and white, from sky to tree to mountain and water, from fast to long exposure, from one corner of the country to another, as the landscape leads; I did not want to impose a structure only to have to maintain it down the line. Accordingly, the new ShinyPhoto is self-organizing: within any slice through the gallery, a set of navigation tags is chosen that splits the images closest to half. Relatedly, the images on the homepage used to be a static selection, manually edited; now they are chosen dynamically by aspect-ratio and score.
Marketing: some aspects of the layout now enjoy a/b testing – no cookies required, but another hash function determines the site appearance and I can check which work best over time.
So far, it’s proving pleasantly easy to live with; apart from the continual debugging and adding of new features – fortunately now slowing down – I’m adding photos at a rate of a handful a day both to the site and to a new RedBubble account in case anyone wants to buy them, one way or another.
So apparently I now like the whole node.js ecosystem. It’s blown away the cobwebs of running – or more accurately not-running – a legacy website, whilst retaining full control of the appearance and structure of the site not handing that over to some third-party site designer.
A few photos from an afternoon stroll around Lady Mary’s Walk outside Crieff, and up Laggan Hill.
River-bank shenanigins:
Views from the riverbank: washed-up plant matter dangling as light reflects across the water.
I’m pretty sure this is evidence of beavers on the River Earn – tree bark removed up to about 2.5′ above the ground with a fine repetitive chisel marking pattern remaining.
Sparseness: a few bright red berries remaining on bare twigs
I’m pretty sure this is evidence of beavers on the River Earn – tree bark removed up to about 2.5′ above the ground with a fine repetitive chisel marking pattern remaining.
Along an avenue of Beech trees
Details that catch one’s eye even in a well-known location: the avenue of beech trees along Lady Mary’s Walk outside Crieff
A well-known scene: the avenue of beech trees along Lady Mary’s Walk outside Crieff
A well-known scene: the avenue of beech trees along Lady Mary’s Walk outside Crieff
A simple silhouette: almost-bare beech tree branches and twigs, a filigree against the sky beyond.
And a favourite tree – always think it looks italicised, leaning at that angle.
One of my favourite trees up Laggan Hill – there’s something aesthetically pleasing about the way this old tree leans –
