A personal journal recording and reflecting on my walks around the world.
Having only joined the lens artist challenge last week I’m fortunate to have a years worth of pictures to choose from for this weeks challenge which is hosted by all so I’ll link it to Sofia’s Post.
The theme provides an opportunity to post pictures that were taken in 2024 but have not previously been posted. It’s also an opportunity for me to post some of the non walking related pictures that I take on my travels.
Over the last few months I’ve been looking at the various challenges that appear on WordPress, watching from afar and wondering if I should dip my toe into one of them.
The car park for the Falls of Kirkaig is empty when we arrive with two steak pie and mashed potato dinners purchased twenty minutes earlier from Lochinver Larder but still hot. “How many other vans do you think will turn up, three, four?” I muse over our meal. Mish looks out of the window at the April showers and lowering temperature and confidently predicts “none”. Surely not, we’re in beautiful Assynt, surrounded by ancient woodland with the Kirkaig river not twenty feet from us. When I look out the window in the early hours the rain has stopped and we are alone, with just the owls, the roaring river and a billion stars twinkling in the ink black night sky to keep us company. Wives, why are they always right.
The Isle of Arran is often referred to as ‘Scotland in Miniature’ because the north of the island is mountainous whereas the south is more pastoral. We’ve brought the van over from Ardrossan and are enjoying a mini road trip around the island, mini because Arran is only twenty miles long and nine miles wide. But what it lacks in acreage it more than makes up for in natural scenery and human history with an abundance of beaches, waterfalls and wildlife, castles, distillery’s and ancient monuments.
Continue reading “A walk to Glenashdale Falls, Isle of Arran”
The ‘Bisses’ of the Valais region of Switzerland are long irrigation channels, many of them hundreds of years old, built to channel water from high mountain streams down to pasture land in the valleys below. Carved out from rock along the valley sides many of them follow a precipitous route with dizzying drops below and vertical cliffs above. The Bisse du Torrent Neuf in the central Valais dates back to the 15th century. Thankfully it’s been restored since and today it offers a spectacular out and back walk along the cliff edges, past sheer rock faces and over wobbly suspension bridges.
Continue reading “A walk along the Bisse du Torrent Neuf, Switzerland”
Five years ago I had the pleasure of walking the Routeburn Track, one of New Zealand’s Great Walks and arguably one of the world’s. Our first night was spent at Routeburn Falls Hut where the peace of the rain forest had competition from a group of fifteen or so exuberant, high spirited and talkative teenage girls from Otago Girls High School on an outward bound course.
“This oak tree and me, we’re made of the same stuff.” Carl Sagan
There has been a great outpouring of emotion and some anger this week and not just on social media about the Sycamore Gap tree. For those who have no idea you can read the story here.
I thought I would tell of my own walk to that tree one grey October day some years ago and share some thoughts as to why it’s felling may have touched people’s emotions.
Continue reading “My walk to Sycamore Gap and some thoughts”