34 images Created 15 Feb 2020
Scotland
After a 42 year absence, we returned - with mild misgivings that the scenery might not be as dramatic, the atmosphere as emotive or the sensual essence as immediate as memories portrayed. A little risky to put it to the test. The memories proved valid. How could we have doubted that the mountains explode from sea-level into the swirling clouds. Rain, alive, lashes out of the heavens on all below, cascading in torrents down craggy, barren slopes to bespatter the lenses of even wary photographers. Clouds arrive in layers and myriad combinations. Sunlight and sunbeams punch through the gaps and local downpours, rainbows appear spontaneously, wind ensures perpetual motion and an endless display of colour, shapes, shadows and fodder for the imagination. The weather becomes part of the physical landscape. Resplendent on sunny days, Scotland looks breathtaking in bad weather.
Our itinerary ran up the west coast. That people eked out an existence in rocky, barely fertile land that only existed on the valley floors or coastal deltas or machairs amid what was, at times, incessant warfare, Viking raids, starvation and infant mortality. They couldn’t eat the scenery. Yet it was embedded in their psych. They did draw strength from their surroundings and, in that, we can connect and share.
Against such a backdrop these images are presented here. Taken in October, past the heather bloom, with the bracken brown. No snow, yet. The sun mostly oblique. Tourists relatively sparse. The images span from Loch Lomond, through Knapdale and Argyle to Skye and Wester Ross as far as Ullapool. The Crinan Canal, built for entirely utilitarian reasons, is an accidental aesthetic gem.
Our itinerary ran up the west coast. That people eked out an existence in rocky, barely fertile land that only existed on the valley floors or coastal deltas or machairs amid what was, at times, incessant warfare, Viking raids, starvation and infant mortality. They couldn’t eat the scenery. Yet it was embedded in their psych. They did draw strength from their surroundings and, in that, we can connect and share.
Against such a backdrop these images are presented here. Taken in October, past the heather bloom, with the bracken brown. No snow, yet. The sun mostly oblique. Tourists relatively sparse. The images span from Loch Lomond, through Knapdale and Argyle to Skye and Wester Ross as far as Ullapool. The Crinan Canal, built for entirely utilitarian reasons, is an accidental aesthetic gem.
