I thought the sparrowhawk had moved on out of our garden – but it is obviously still around as we got a very nice shot of it in the webcam. It’s the most beautiful bird – although of course it is entirely inimical to all our chaffinches and tits. Having said that – we have […]

I had a go at making some home made flaky pastry which turned out pretty well. Actually the GBBO has been very inspirational for me as I never used to make this stuff before. The picture shows my sausage rolls with the home made pastry.

We went up Beinn Donich again today. Broadly this year has been a rotten year for climbing and we haven’t managed to get many new mountains done, but today was an exception. It was just the right temperature and very sunny too. Here are some of the photos…. While we were walking down the hill […]

I got a rather nice picture of the moon over our garden as I went out for a walk early the other day. Also some rather spectacular clouds over Beinn Bheula.

Our apple trees keep producing more and more fruit this year – to the extent that I am struggling to know what to do with it. Today I am making a load of apple jelly – hopefully my father who is very fond of preserves of all sorts will appreciate it. This has only cleared […]

We saw an amusing encounter between a young fox and a large badger the other night. The fox was originally eating the peanuts when the badger arrived. For a few moments it looked as though it was going to stand its ground but the badger just glared at it and it quickly backed off. The […]

By the look of it this little fellow who visited the other night was probably only born in the spring this year. For some reason, all pine martens seem to have an odd loping gait – almost as though they had something wrong with one of their legs.

We saw this beautiful fly agaric near to the Donich Waterfalls today. I always associate fungi with autumn and in theory today is the last day of summer. Also the big sycamore tree at the bottom of our garden is rapidly losing his leaves. Actually summer in Lochgoilhead is my least favourite part of the […]

For the last couple of weeks I have been catching sight of a raptor around the bird table. Unfortunately it is very shy and disappears every time I am starting to take my camera out – however my friend J has done better than me and managed to get some photos while he was looking […]

On Saturday R and I went to Kilmarten and had a look at some of the ancient monuments associated with the Kingdom of Dalriada. This has a particular resonance for me as one of my favourite books is Rosemary Sutcliffe’s “Mark of the Horse Lord”, which is set in Argyll during the late Roman period […]