Category: Scotland
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Cracking sunset last night
Actually, the sun had already set. Half past ten! Parked up at Balnakeil Bay near Durness. Open Space Web-Map builder Code
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Kyle of Tongue from Ben Loyal
Or Beinn Laghail to give it its proper Gaelic name, Ben Loyal being just an Anglicised spelling. Laghail is thought to come from the Norse “laga fiall” meaning law mountain. Although others have suggested a mountain of trees as an alternative derivation , law mountain is the more likely as there is a strong Norse…
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Stacks of Duncansby
A pair of dramatic sea stacks just off the north-easterly tip of the British mainland. But we almost lost them. Apparently in 1953, in what seems like a bizarre Monty Python sketch scientists from the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment had proposed to test a nuclear bomb on top of one of the stacks. The Stacks…
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Badbea
I’ve seen before the deserted black houses of communities in fertile straths that were cleared by absentee landlords to make way for vast sheep farms. I had thought the villagers were often provided with a small croft on the east coast in towns such as Wick and left to make a living from the sea.…
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Bullers of Buchan
“The Pot”, once a massive sea cave with a collapsed roof. A buller is a whirlpool or in this case, it refers to the bellowing noise coming from The Pot as the sea roars through the arch. There is a local legend of a fisherman, in his boat one evening seeing a mermaid at the…
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Old Kirk Shore
Woke up to a sea fret but by the time I set off to explore the coastline north of the former fishing town of Stonehaven, it was well on the way to clearing. Stonehaven can just be made out through the mist. The coast comprises vegetated cliffs which form the eastern end of the Highland…
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Guillemots
Magnificent sea birds which spend most of their time at sea, only coming to land to nest on the sea cliffs where level ground is at a premium. At the RSPB Fowlsheugh Reserve just south of Stonehaven. The name Fowlsheugh actually means âbird cliffâ so it is quite appropriate. Open Space Web-Map builder Code
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Battle of Dunbar 1650
Some of you might remember, but, in 2013, work was stopped on the construction of the new cafĂ© at Palace Green Library between Durham Cathedral and Durham Castle when human remains were found, tightly packed in two mass graves. It was probably on the local news but when it was released that the bodies were,…
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Antonine Wall
A huge ditch gives some idea of the scale of the engineering the Romans put into the building of the Antonine Wall. Stretching 40 miles across Scotland between the Clyde and the Forth estuaries, it was built of the orders of the Emporer Antonius Pius in AD142 and occupied for 22 years before being abandoned…
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Hill of Fire
Tinto, perhaps the most prominent hill in the Clyde valley. At 707m above sea level it is not particularly high but still a very popular climb. The name means the hill of fire, a reference to the druidic practice of lighting fires on the summit to their sun god. A Bronze Age burial cairn, the…