A Sunny December Day

It's been a terrible summer and autumn and I don't think here on Lewis we have had a period of 24 hours without rain since April. I may be wrong but not very! Today was different. The sun shone out of a clear blue sky and despite that it was a relatively balmy 6℃. When you get days like this on Lewis the light is truly fantastic and changes by the hour. So the mountains of Canisp (left) and Suilven on the Scottish mainland looked entirely different in the morning:  

and the afternoon:

and there's snow on them there hills:

The hills of Harris from the road over the moor from my house to the main road:

Even the wind-farm over the Stornoway outlying townships look spectacular:

My Last Climb of The Clisham

On a day in March 2004 Gaz and I had planned to climb The Clisham: the highest mountain in the Outer Hebrides, at 799 metres (2,621 ft) the archipelago's only Corbett.   Not long previously we had climbed Ben Lomond: at 974 metres (3,196 ft) and situated on the eastern shore of Loch Lomond, it is the most southerly of the Munros.   My photos, however, show the former on one of the most glorious of days.  

For Gaz, who the previous week had climbed Mont Blanc, this was just a  stroll in the park. 

A Journey

I spend a lot of time traveling.  Nowhere near as much time as many people.  For example I was with a friend yesterday who travels 50+ urban miles a day commuting.  Most of my traveling is pleasurable.  Much of it is by air but sometimes by sea and often by car.  So when I went to Callander on Thursday I decided to follow the sat nav and not my usual route.  What a revelation it turned out to be.  She took me over the Campsies - a range of hills to the North and East of Glasgow.  It was a road over which I had never traveled before.  It was beautiful.  So beautiful I came back the same way (and went over again today to Fintry for lunch).

Looking back to Callander.  (HDR image).

The little village of Kippen even has a very inviting good food shop

and several inns.

On the tops

On the Southern flanks

Fellwalking

Sitting a'Top a Mountain

The scene: a moving boat out in The Minch as we sailed out of Loch Broom on a moderately easy swell as night fell.  Added to that a camera using the equivalent of a 640 mm lens this was never going to be the perfect photo.  But the huge orange disc sitting on top of a mountain in the Highlands of Scotland was just to good an opportunity to pass over.  So there's no claim here to anything other than a photographic record of a memorable moment standing on the side of MV Isle of Lewis on an autumn evening.

'The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to'  Carl Sandburg

A Misty Morning in Borrowdale

Whilst I was looking for a picture that I knew I had of a gate to nowhere on the top of a mountain in the English Lake District for Soaring Through the World in Pictures I was browsing through a few of the thousands of photos I took over the years that I visited that hallowed ground.  I came across these slides taken, I think, around 1970 very early one autumn morning in Borrowdale.  They were magical times.  They are untouched up and far from perfect but they captured my heart at the time because they had a vague, almost out of focus air about them which reflected the reality of the moment.