R and I scared a heron off our pond this morning and there are plenty of signs of spring around the village, but the snow being back definitely shows us that winter has not departed for this year as yet. There were also some good tracks down our drive which are definitely not the cats so must be a badger or fox.

I’d love to be off for a mountain walk today, but unfortunately (or from the point of view of the company finances, fortunately) I have tests booked in until the end of the month.

These are some views of the snowscape and tracks this morning.

Anyway, the walk (up to the waterfall, on to the side of Beinn Donich, and back round the long way) was very interesting. No one had been before us since the snow – no human that is. But there were animal tracks everywhere, mainly badger, fox, deer and marten, but we saw others we couldn’t recognize. It was so pristine, and the snow had covered over the ugly mess the construction work on the hydro is leaving at the moment. Coming back, we could see over the village, laid out in perfect monochrome, as though it were a black and white photograph of itself.

Snowfalls are one of the ways you get to appreciate what a rich environment we live in as the tracks of wildlife were everywhere. Obviously a lot of them were down to the cats, but when R and I were out for our 7:30am walk in the pristine snowscape, we came across tracks near our gates of badgers and at least two deer (I’m no Aragon but one was a big deer and one a small one). Other tracks I saw later as we cleared the driveway (Oban Express couldn’t get their van up the drive) were probably a pine marten.

It all makes you think that if we can see this in the depth of winter, what would it be like if the tracks were visible in summer…

Talking about the depths of winter – when I was out taking a photo of the snow, I noticed the first shoots of the grape hyacinths which grow over our patio in spring pushing through.