Madness or Moonshine

The recent full moon was the Lenten Moon or the Snow Moon as the Americans call it and, true to form, there were a few flakes drifting down this morning but they soon vanished with the sunshine. The cold bright sunlight has brightened the post winter gloom and Spring does seem on its way. 

The aconites, snowdrops and crocuses are out as are the hellebores.

The Christmas Rose (helleborus niger), the earliest of its kind is past now but the Lenten Rose (helleborus orientalis) is in full flower.

Poisonous, its name means "harmful to eat", it has many legends surrounding it. In witchcraft, it is used to summon demons. In Greek mythology it was used to save the daughters of the king of Argos from madness and was supposed to have been used to poison Alexander the Great. That such a delicate flower could be so toxic and yet so appealing makes one reflect on the nature of things.

Full moons are supposed to induce madness or lunacy though scientific evidence seems to suggest that this is all moonshine... unless you are a werewolf!

 There is still something bewitching... there's that magic word again...about full moons.

The next full moons will be the Egg Moon in April, the Milk Moon in May and the Flower Moon in June......and in May there will be a Blue Moon but that's another story.

As Lent approaches, what will I give up?

 Not moon-watching anyway.

Painting the clouds with sunshine

Pre-dawn

Up early this morning to try and catch a sight of the "dance of the planets" Five of the planets are to line up across the sky just before dawn all this week from Jupiter, up near the brightest star Arcturus, to Mars, Saturn, then to Venus and finally, Mercury low on the horizon. Hopefully the clear skies will hold until the weekend.

 Waxing Gibbous Moon

The stars were bright enough to overcome the light of a gibbous moon so the planets could be picked out.  Jupiter big and bright, Mars dusky red, Saturn  difficult to spot and Venus clear as ever. Clouds low on the horizon obscured Mercury.

The fiery red dawn heralded another rare phenomenon, a mother-of-pearl sky or nacreous clouds.

High in the stratosphere they didn't move but shone, vivid and iridescent for an hour or more until the rising sun dispelled their magic.

  The camera, at least, my camera didn't do it justice.  Truly worth getting of of bed early to witness.

Winter visitors

Winter has come at least in part to the village. The moors are covered with a dusting of snow and it has turned cold enough to bring the blackcap to the bird feeders. Loth got a surprise when a sparrow hawk, so intent on snatching a meal from the garden birds clustering round the peanuts that it didn't swerve in time, clattered into one of the kitchen windows. leaving a ghostly silhouette of outspread wings on the glass.

The next day I saw a kestrel hunting like a sparrow hawk. Instead of hovering in the freezing wind, it was skimming along in the lea of a drystone dyke no doubt looking for voles or mice in much the same way as a sparrow hawk patrols the hedgerows for unwary tits and sparrows. 

Greylags

The wee lochan beneath the Lowrie Knowes - the Hillocks of the Fox in auld Scots - has its usual quota of winter visitors. There were whooper swans and grey lag geese along with a small flock of wigeon paddling around in the decreasing circle of open water as the ice crept across the surface.

Whoopers, wigeon and coots  sharing the small patch of open water

There seem to be an increased number of snipe and jack snipe presumably due to winter migrants but no sign of the large flocks of fieldfares and redwings that were a feature of previous winters, possibly due to the enthusiastic tidying up of the local hedgerows with scarcely a haw or a berry left on the clipped bushes.

Along the sea shore, a golden eye and a diver were seen fishing among the kittiwakes and the shags, The diver was too far out and too elusive to be seen accurately but it might have been a red throated diver. It looked smaller than our usual resident, the great northern.

All in all, its nice when old friends call back.

...winter and rough weather

Sunrise on the winter solstice !

The winter solstice was a washout. Sunrise over the sea looked like matt paint shade card...for shades of blue- grey.

The view to the horizon looked like Rothko painting

 There was a full moon on Christmas Eve and Aurora Borealis on Hogmanay but apart from these highlights it has been an unremittingly dreich month.

Luckily the downpours held off for the New year's day dip in the sea, a custom inaugurated by a few of us some years..come to think of it, some decades... ago which has grown in popularity.

Flooding hasn't been the problem here possibly because the winds have been from the south west. It is when the wind is easterly that the sea unleashes its full fury on the sea wall

The harbour was filled with foamy spume which covered boats and gear and blew over the quayside.

The relatively mild winter has kept the more unusual visitors away from the bird feeder, the woodpecker and nuthatch have only paid the briefest of visits and the long-tailed tits, goldfinches and black-caps haven't been seen. We are hoping it is the availability of food in the countryside that is allowing them to stay away. They only visit in severe weather giving the garden birds, the tits, sparrows, robins and wrens the run of the feeders when they can find food else where. The blackies have pecked their way through all the windfall apples from the eating varieties and are now started on the cookers. Presumably, they prefer the former for the higher sugar content but they obviously have a sweet tooth just like us or at least a sweet beak. One shouldn't attribute such characteristics to wild creatures but they do always go for the eaters first!

Strange weather, seasons out of kilter, makes for odd happenings. The daffodils we planted along the verges to make a golden gateway to the village are starting to bloom, The aconites are in flower at the same time as the Lenten roses. The pot marigolds are showing their sunny faces alongside the winter flowering jasmine...the only sun we've see this year.

The world seems topsy-turvy and that's without the elections and referenda to come this year.

2016 looks to be an interesting year.

There is an old curse... May you live in interesting times !

We shall see.

The blush of dawn.

I don't like the dark days of winter. Rising in darkness always seems like a chore but to be abroad before dawn has its compensations.    The world is stirring and stealing a march on it makes me feel  virtuous.
 Yesterday's walk for the newspapers was lit by a moon just past the full. The moon before Yule, to give it its title. The next full moon will be The Moon after Yule, then the Wolf Moon, then the Lenten Moon and so on.
Up in the western sky, at the anti-solar point, opposite where the sunrise would be, was a pinkish glow.
I wondered if this was the so called Belt of Venus, a rosy pinkish arch visible after sunset or before sunrise, caused by back scattering of refracted sunlight from fine dust particles high in the atmosphere.     Sometimes there is a dark band below it caused by the Earth's own shadow but this morning the horizon was obscured by cloud

Hop into the car and up on to the moors to check against the western sky and ..yes.. I think it was...
the pink band across the sky opposite the  not-yet-arrived  sunrise.... the  moon setting over the Belt of Venus.
 Dark days have their light side.

Willow weep no more

According to the financial pages, there is a housing shortage in the UK. People are desperate to get on the property ladder and have created a dearth of available property.

The problem has come closer to home. The blue tits are homeless. They will have to migrate to the other side of the garden and compete with the tree sparrows and coal tits for accommodation.

The storm winds have brought down the willow, the pussy willow  the goat willow, Salix caprea,  at the bottom of the garden and with it both the nesting box still attached to its stout trunk and the one in its upper branches.

The tree was a measure of our time in this house. In the spring of the first year, the garden was full of daffodils. Grandmother, on a tour-of-inspection visit, picked some and acquired, as was her wont, from goodness knows who or where, some pussy willow twigs, and made up a simple arrangement.

There wasn't a willow tree anywhere near our house.

When the daffs faded and were on their way to the newly established compost heap, I noticed little rootlets on three of the willow stems and thinking they deserved a chance, stuck them into the ground by the garden wall. They flourished and grew into a tall tree which still showed the three trunks corresponding to the three original stems. Pruning and loppings over the years as it spread its shade had reduced its grandeur to a single trunk.

Now its gone. It will be trimmed and sawn up in to logs that will heat us just as it once shaded us.

The bird boxes can be saved and relocated but no sites are as suitable as the old willow where the comings and goings of the parent birds and the fledglings first appearance and tentative flights could be observed, without their disturbance, from the dining room.

We have lived in this house longer than the life of a tree, children and grandchildren have been intrigued by the furry catkins, bees have relished an early drink of nectar in the cold days of early Spring, pigeons have balanced the rickle of twigs they call a nest among it branches and the sparrow hawk has perched there, camouflaged against its grey bark.

The willow will be missed and not just by us.

Winter Warmth

The Hidden Valley

I've been to Glen Coe many times, climbing, walking or just passing through en route to another bit of the Highlands but for some reason I've never climbed up to the Hidden Valley. It was always a case of " the next time"... too short an excursion for a single trip but a bit much to tack on to a Munro-bash. I began to realise that it had to be soon or I wasn't ever going to mange up the track by the stream, Allt Coire Gabhail, to the Valley of the Booty, the reputed hiding place of the MacDonalds of Glencoe for stolen cattle and a place of refuge at the time of the Massacre ( Blog 01/04/2015)

Coire Gabhail betwen Beann Fhada and Gearr Aonach

Coire Gabhail (Corrie of the Plunder) is a high level glen in the Bidean nam Bian massif to the south of Glen Coe. Invisible from the  main glen, it is accessed by a track up the side of the ravine that carries the allt or stream to the Meeting of the Three Waters on the River Coe. The track rises between Beinn Fhada and Gearr Aonach, two of the "Three Sisters" on the south side of Glen Coe. 

The third of the trio is Aonach Dubh, the Black Ridge.where lies Ossian's Cave, a site that is a bit too inaccessible for me nowadays. 

 Gearr Aonach and Aonach Dubh with part of the old military road

 

Ossian was the mythological poet, son of Fingal - also with a cave named after him- whose works were made famous and almost certainly made up by James Macpherson in the nineteenth century. Despite their forgery they were part of the image of Scotland and Scottishness that still survives to this day

Beinn Fhada (Long Hill) is the easternmost sister, and the central sister Gearr Aonach (Short Ridge) on the right of the hidden valley forms its western side.

Crossing the river, the land around the stream is surrounded by a deer-proof fence, allowing regeneration of woodland, mainly birch, rowan and hazel. The project was started in 1983 and gives an idea what the Highlands would look like without deer and sheep. It would be great if it could be extended to encompass more of the barren sheep bitten hillsides.

The path is well constructed with stone steps in places but still needs a fair bit of scrambling and a bit of hands on climbing over rocky outcrops. Just how the MacDonalds ever got a herd of cattle up to the valley was beyond me.

The cascading waterfalls feeding into the burn made a wonderful background to the walk and the waters in the pools were unbelievably clear.

Ferns and wild flowers freed from the mowing of the sheep were abundant...sheepsbit scabious, self heal and the tiny golden stars of tormentil. 

 

After surmounting the last sloping rock...not something I would like to try in the rain.. the top of the path was in sight and not, as often happens on the hills, a false summit. No, we had truly reached the top. A few more steps and the lost valley spread out before us. The great cliff of Gearr Aonach forms the west side and the slopes of Beinn Fhada, the east. Ahead was the massive Stob Coire Sgreamhach. 

The valley appears with Stob Coire Sgreamhach in the distance

 

The Hidden Valley

Sitting on the slope down into the valley, replenishing the energy stores, we could hear the red deer stags bellowing as the annual rut started. The sound echoed off the walls of the glen, challenging all, asserting the dominance of the herd leader.

The descent a bit trickier going down the rocky bits than coming up but accomplished without injury or indignity then back across the bridge to the old military road, General Wade's road, by which the Hanoverian government sought to subdue the Highlands after Culloden.

Built to let troops move easily around from their bases at Forts William, Augustus and George, the new roads provide an economic boon the people of the area allowing transport of cattle and goods to improve and eliminate the need for hidden pastures.

A good day out before the chill of winter and another tick on the list.