A week with Gordie

We have spent this week at Gordon's, near Skipness, Kintyre... as in the Mull of Kintyre... complete with mist rolling in!! It is lovely to see Gordie again and catch up with what he is up to. Gordon was always there when we lived in Kiddam. His family had a holiday cottage down the road and he grew up spending his holidays 'sauntering' in the same hills and valleys that I did. He was a good friend of Mom and Avner's - fishing, swimming, playing recorder, making hay...


We have climbed yet another peak, this one, the highest on Arran, the island that Gordon's wee house looks out to. The top of Goats Fell was, as most peaks in the UK, cloud covered, cold and windy, only this one didn't clear as we have been so fortunate so far. Instead we enjoyed a good Scottish mist, or was it drizzle, for a view. But the views on the way down, below the cloud line, were spectacular.


We went with Gordon to bring in the sheep for the shearer and see the farm that he works on, a vast estate that is engaged in forestry, farming and nature conservation. Gordon has written a very involved nature plan for the estate, for the foundation to which the farm belongs and I am currently reading my way through it; the attempt to manage nature in the aftermath of hundreds of years of human intervention – farming and forestry is now an integral part of the plan as we have killed off so many natural predators and habitats!

Gordon set his moth trap as part of his endeavour to keep an eye on what is happening out there and I took great delight in practising macro with my fancy new camera.

We visited the owl centre and saw the most bizarre looking birds! Fascinating but quite spooky looking really! We walked in 'ancient' forests across the road from his house and down by the shore. These are as old as they get here, nothing like the untouched old growth in Australia, but amazing that they exist at all given the size, population and history of Britain! The little sessile oaks twisted and gnarled were maybe 300 years old, nothing much younger because of the grazing of sheep and now the deer, but people are working on it. We went otter spotting and saw one some way off frolicking on the rocks and rolling in the water. I took a shot but he was beyond the range of my telescopic!! But I got some lovely pictures of the bay anyway.

Gerard and the girls have been reading, reading, reading. Gordon has his grandfather's library so Gerard has been partaking of a little of everything from Thoreau to Charles Darwin... I think the books may be as old as the forests here.