It had been a hot and sweaty day in the garden working away at clearing the drive of it's neglected weeds. Now as dusk was falling it was clear that night time was going to be the same. The temperature had barely fallen and the humidity seemed to be rising. I decided some night time photography would be a good idea and clearly being by the water would be the best option. Heck - I might even dip a toe.
A short drive later I closed the car door and walked the few yards to one of my favourite spots: The bridge at Belhaven. The air was still; the tide was on the way in and the fading light was spectacular in that way you only seem to see by the water lip. Dark shadows flitted by as the last birds or the first bats passed overhead.
A few moments set up the tripod and fixed the wide angle lens and I began to shoot. Light was almost gone so exposure times were much longer than normal to pull what was left of the light out of the sky.
I had an enjoyable time clicking away while the light slowly faded. I understand now why photographers call this ' The Golden Hour'
I stand outside where I’m working and savour the coffee in the cool of the evening, letting its heat and dense flavour work out the kinks that have grown unnoticed over the last few hours. It’s been a hard shift and this is the first chance I’ve had to stop even for just a drink in several hours. The garden is cool and tranquil in the late evening light and I linger there away from the house which has absorbed so much heat from the day.I notice a cloud of tiny black flies gathered under the eaves at the nearest corner just under the roof, perhaps drawn by some warmth escaping into the night or reflected by the pale stone of the building. They twist and turn in the last of the sunlight until suddenly three swallows come tearing round the side of the house banked steeply on their wingtips and cut through the swarm. The moment is imprinted in my mind like a slow motion high definition movie and I see the birds’ creamy bellies flash crimson as the last rays of the dying sun hit them perfectly. One of those incredible memories you might carry a lifetime.
An hour later, within moments of leaving work, the car crosses the battlefield of Prestonpans, where the screaming charge of Charlie's Jacobite Highlanders routed the Government redcoats in 1745. The tune of ‘Hey Johnnie Cope’ comes to mind; the famous song written soon after which commemorates their victory and lampoons the English General as being the first soldier ever to bring his king news of his own defeat, so quickly did he run for Dunbar and a ship to safety in England. A few moments later I follow his route as I swing the car onto the A1, the famous Great North Road; the easiest, most direct of the ancient routes from London to Edinburgh and which echoes many of the trails of long forgotten combatants in one direction or the other across the centuries. It will take me to Dunbar and beyond through a landscape littered with the echoes of its history.
The car accelerates and a steady thrum builds between tyres and road while I turn up the volume on the classical music station I’m listening to. Sometimes, especially on nights like this, classical music is the only thing for me and there’s a Debussy piece oozing from the speakers as I lose myself in music and in pondering potential strategies to help a client facing huge challenges from his autism. The car cruises on at a steady pace without any conscious thought from me as the road rises from the coast. There will never be more than a few miles between the road and sea for the thirty-odd minute journey while I cut across the county to home.
Debussy gives way to Chopin and to a wonderful choral piece which therapeutically massages the day away. Outside, the old county town of Haddington and its neighbour, the huge, rocky plug of Traprain Law - hilltop capital of the Celtic Votadini tribe in the first centuries AD – pass unseen but somehow silently acknowledged in the gathering darkness. Speed increases as the car swoops down Dunpender hill and barrels across the high bridge spanning the Tyne and a mile further on the lights of nearby East Linton catch my eye– linn is an old Scots word for waterfall so this is ‘the village of the falls’ – and I realise for the first time that I’ve been on autopilot for more than a dozen miles. I’ve no recollection of the road since turning onto the A1 almost twenty minutes ago. Its incredible how you can drive this way – doing something so familiar that one part of the brain takes control to manage perfectly while another part wanders free. I wonder just how safe it is, or am I just kidding myself, fortunate that a deer or badger hasn’t jumped out from the gloom around me. Yet I don’t feel tired. I feel alert and engaged apart from this ‘absence’ of miles. If anything my thinking while on the road has revived me and I’m sure I’ve been safe. But just in case I decide it’s time to pay attention and get on with the last ten or fifteen miles to home.
The road to Dunbar and beyond is a level ten minutes of fairly straight dual carriageway interrupted only by a couple of roundabouts. From there the road rises on the sleeve of the hill from where another Scots army descended long ago to fight an English one, this time with devastating results for the Scots. By the time I’ve mused this I know I’ve passed the ‘battle-stane’ memorial which commemorates the event and am passing the site of the oldest house found in Scotland so far, a roundhouse constructed eight thousand years ago. I carry on past little villages tucked away unseen in the dark folds of The Lammermoor Hills; places whose names echo their Celtic, Pictish, Saxon, Viking, Northumbrian, English or Scots heritage, and hint at just how crucial this easily traversed little coastal plain has been to human existence for millennia. How much turmoil in the turning of centuries?
I speed on past Torness, the nuclear power station, incongruously and garishly lit in the midst of all this history, the car rushing to get out of its light like a nocturnal animal. The road is empty as far as the headlights can reach and I’m alone for the next two miles by the water. Another minute and I’m crossing a bridge high over a tumbling stream in a deep but narrow ravine and feel the four earlier bridges still nearby in the dark. The road tilts gently up toward a brightly lit roundabout and here I swing right into the dark again and take the hairpin as the road turns back on itself before the short climb to the brow of the hill, past the graveyard and on down to our ancient village originally named for a long dead Viking where at last I turn into the drive and put such thoughts from my head. The car bounces on a pothole at the start of the drive and suddenly I’m back in the now. Debussy is again pouring from the radio and I realise I'm completely exhausted.
Despite that it seems my autopilot has got me safely home again.
I was out with my camera yesterday and passed by this local spot which has always intrigued me. It's on the road out of Innerwick, a neighbouring village a few miles from home, and is situated at the roadside of a what is a very quiet minor road these days but in times past was what used to be a 'Drove Road' used as a route for driving animals to market. These Drove Roads are some of the most ancient pathways, used from the far distant past and were designed to allow movement of beasts with decent fodder and watering along the way. They also followed routes which gave as much protection as possible to both animals and men in what must have sometimes been dangerous times. This watering place is much more ancient than the sandstone water fountain that is there now and may have been a spring or a place where fieldwater conveniently gathered.
The Inscription
I've never seen one with an inscription like this before and it dates from the 1870's. It takes Victorian sentimentality and Scots God fearing and blends them well together in an appeal - or warning - to drovers to look after the animals in their care, as well as providing them with a place to stop and water them before carrying on with the journey to market. They must have been a hardy breed these travelers and their animals. Often highlanders would walk their famous black cattle down from the mountains - even the islands off the west coast - to markets and fairs many miles south in the lowlands or even down into England if they felt they could get a good price before turning and walking all the way back home. Cattle from the Isle of Skye were swam across the narrow strait to the mainland at Glenelg while their masters rowed across before they would be walked to the markets at Falkirk and Lanark or further afield. The journey could take weeks and involved avoiding raiders and gangs bent on extortion or robbery. Once the market town had been reached, a price agreed and paid, drovers would return home with their fee and the money belonging to the farmers before returning to their own crofts and families.
The taking of money payments to allow drovers and their charges past unscathed was an activity that thrived in the highlands and in the lands controlled by Border Reivers in the south and became known as blackmail from two Gaelic words blathaich pronounced (the th silent) bl-aich (to protect) and mal (tribute, payment).
I'm sitting at the kitchen table as usual and it's late on Saturday night. My Lovely G left me hours ago and is now fast asleep and snug in bed while I am slowly getting to the stage of cold between the shoulder blades that means that I am far too cold for comfort and also means that when I do eventually go to bed, that I'd better stay away from that aforementioned warm and snug flesh that will be lying temptingly beside me otherwise instant and severe retribution will descend upon my person.
Strange how several things go wrong at the same time. Although this week I, at last, got my car back from the repairers with a shiny new front bumper and skirt { they valeted the whole car so it looks a lot better than when it went in.} back home at the house though it seems like if anything could go wrong, it would this week. Firstly our built in microwave oven packed in, then the proper oven underneath and the next day our dishwasher - my 'beloved' dishwasher - died a lingering death. You can still hear it wheezing and trying to turn over but you know it's a hopeless case, it just doesn't know it's gleamed it's last load. Thankfully all are covered by insurance protection for repair so we had an engineer turn up to pronounce on our misbehaving 'white goods' {which is an odd thing to call them as most of them are silver}. A talented man, he resurrected the dishwasher, at least long enough to do one final load and for him to make a dignified exit, identified the malaise affecting the fan oven and ordered a replacement element and gave the microwave its last rites. Then our little phone system packed in so that only one of the three phones was working. Of course the one that was left working was the one that was furthest away from you any time it rang.
From upstairs.
Last night snow arrived. Although the East coast has been hit by widespread snow over the last few days, our wee corner avoided it and although there had been the odd flurry, it came to nothing. I knew as I watched the news reports of cars skittering and slewing down wintry roads that I shouldn't be smug, just grateful, but it's been hard - with a newly repaired front end - not to have been over pleased that others were suffering and not me. But last night the snow that had been promised all week finally came and the roads, untouched by any snow ploughs or gritters, have quickly become challenging. I took the lovely G to Dunbar station this morning for her train and hoped beyond hope for a thaw as we were planning to go through to Glasgow later in the afternoon for a concert, but several snowy hours later I decided that it was a daft notion to think of going so far in weather like this. I did however go to pick up the Lovely G from her Edinburgh office so we could instead go looking for a new microwave.
It was a complete white out as I left to pick her up, snow whipping horizontally across the windscreen or doing that maddening, demented straight on frontal attack on your vision that can make you feel disorientated. Within half a mile I was seriously thinking of calling ahead to advise that maybe she should just get on the first train to meet me in Dunbar and we go home and have the rest of the day in front of a roaring fire. The phone rang - my Lovely G does like to check I'm on schedule - and she listened without much sympathy as I explained in worried tones about how bad the road was, how little could be seen outside the window in front of my face. "Well it's perfectly OK here. The sky's blue and there's no snow anywhere!" came back at me with mildly disbelieving tones. Heartened by such encouragement I drove on for ten minutes in the same all consuming blizzard until suddenly and quite without warning, I emerged into a blinding white landscape under a beautiful sky, pale blue and lilac in the bright sun. East Lothian has a beautiful and dramatic landscape under ordinary circumstances, with its real contrasts of rolling farmland studded with the rocky outcrops of the volcanic plugs of Traprain and North Berwick Law's and just offshore, The Bass Rock, but coming from a literal snowstorm into a Winter wonderland, it was doubly so.
Absolutely breathtaking.
By the time I had passed Haddington the weather was all behind me and the road, although still only one lane of dual carriageway was relatively clear, I had a clear run into Edinburgh ahead. Despite all the amazing scenery around I was still anxious about the return journey, even more so as I looked at the huge black cloud behind me in my rear view mirror that showed what I had just come from. I knew I wasn't going to be in the frame of mind to concentrate on doing any shopping.
And I was right. But, that's a tale for another post, one of my ranty, grumping and curmudgeonly howls at the moon.
Looking back to the house.
Today although the snow is about five inches deep in the drive and drifts up to about a foot or so here and there, I'm quite mellow. That won't last though as I have a long standing arrangement today to take friends to the airport for a Winter holiday flight to sunnier climes. I can feel the apprehension rise even as I write this as the forecast is for more heavy snow today and having driven yesterday I know that despite claims of plenty of road salt in depots, the financial crises means that a minimum of work has been done on gritting the roads and the drive will be on a potential skating rink, so I'm bracing myself for a bum clenching couple of hours driving there and back.
There's something special about this time of year. Lots of bloggers have mentioned it this week. Weather changes, temperature cools, light softens, days get shorter as seasons slowly turn. Summer's morphosis into Autumn is on the way and this morning leaves are being buffeted by wind and rain. The grass at the front of the house is strewn with windfall pears which the birds are gorging themselves on. At the back of the house the swallows, who have nested under the eaves for the first time this year, are efficiently feeding the second brood of the season in preparation for the all too soon departure to warmer climes.
The land around is a brown and green patchwork of fields that have been shorn or are waiting the attention of the harvesters that slow morning traffic on country roads. Fields seem full to bursting point with bales of hay. Harvested fields are industriously ploughed by farmers eager to sow the next crop. Fields of potatoes grow strongly in the red East Lothian soil and evening roads reverberate to the sound of tractors and lorries loaded with hay-bales being moved to storage. Livestock too seems to dominate areas as huge numbers of sheep and cattle graze on fields of lush grass.
For me it's a time of naive reassurance. The garden fruit trees have been groaning with the weight of the crop they have grown this year. Heavy branches bend earthwards and early windfalls have been scooped up with relish to be rushed to the kitchen. The glut of apples and pears is upon us and neighbours and family have been warned of imminent arrivals. Link this with the bounty that's evident in the harvest all around and it's easy to ignore thoughts of gobal warming and the sooth-sayers or doom and gloom merchants of agricultural and economic disaster. Surely if the land is capable of producing such huge bounty as this year there can't be too much wrong with the climate? With a summer behind us thankfully free of warnings of water shortages, it's all too easy to put thoughts like those to one side at this time of year. Mother Nature is fecund and ripe. Everything is therefore in balance. Everything's OK. Forget the worries. Time now for many to plan that holiday jetting off to sunny climes for winter sun and cheap booze. Time enough for me simply to enjoy the moment, to savour this all too short period of transition as the seasons continue to turn inexorably through their cycles.
The light in the evenings is superb and my camera is never far from my hand. You can - until today at least - comfortably wear T-shirts right through till night time and thoughts of central heating are still weeks away. Evenings can be enjoyed spent on the patio with a book and a glass of something until light forces us indoors.
It's got to be one of my favourite times of year and I know how fortunate I am to be able to spend it here in this lovely little corner of the world. 'Coastkid', a local blogger friend who's tales of cycling in this area I follow with interest, is a talented amateur film maker and regularly posts some wonderful GWF's {great wee films} of his treks hereabouts. A couple of days ago he and his helmet camera captured much of the essence of East Lothian in these short weeks with a wee film which happily he's allowed me to post for you here. Drop by his blog or look him up on you tube to catch more of his fabulous GWF's.
The lovely G and I had three full days together as it was her birthday this weekend. Each day we went out somewhere she chose for the day and just enjoyed spending time together.
Today she wanted to go back to Tantallon Castle, a local attraction and one of our favourites, just a half hour drive along the coast. After an enjoyable but very windy visit we left Tantallon and the Bass to the birds and the wild wind and headed into North Berwick for a walk down the High Street and a spot of late lunch before driving home to get settled for the final of the World Cup this evening, which we watched with some nibbles and an appropriately good red wine.
Bass Rock Lighthouse is built on foundations of the old castle prison.
Birds wheel round the cliffs and turn the rock white with their numbers at this time of year.
Tha castle is on a promontory surrounded by sheer cliffs.
The Lovely G wanted to do some gift shopping for a forthcoming birthday in the family so we headed up the coast to North Berwick for a walk round and a look at some of the gift/craft shops. It's been a beautifully sunny day here and nice and warm to match, even if the forecast for tomorrow is rain - all the better for G returning to work as there's nothing worse than going back after a holiday with the sun splitting the sky - so we wanted to make the best of it with a wee trip out.
Over the wall to Bass Rock
I took the camera along but the sun was so bright the colours seem washed out.
N. Berwick beach
The town was busy with holiday makers and golfers all doing their thing in the sun and after a short hunt we managed to get something suitable as a birthday present so we had a light lunch and a walk before coming back home to relax in the garden as the grass has been duly cut this morning as promised.
Another shot of the poppies and the field wall.
The Bass Rock is gleaming white with breeding gannets and other sea birds. You could just see the gannets whirling round the cliffs but I never took a shot as I didn't have the telephoto lens with me. It's a beautiful contrast with the blue of the water today. Shame the photo doesn't do it proper justice. The rock is the home to the worlds largest single rock colony of Gannets and has a live webcam to allow you to watch the Gannets
Tantallon Castle
Tantallon Castle looked squat and forbidding across the fields. The car park was unusually busy for once. I took this without realising I had the phone lines in the shot.....sheeesh!!!
After this it was back to the house for a nice glass of chilled asti with lime - one of my favourite out-doorsy summer drinks - quietly reading in the sun on the patio. A nice way to while away some of the afternoon.
With all airports in the UK closed today due to a cloud of ash from the Icelandic volcano with an unpronounceable name, weather punters were telling us all to look to the sky tonight for a potentially dramatic sunset. So camera in hand I set of to document this predicted masterpiece and took the following photo's.
Jings, it's been a wee while since I have taken the time just to blog about this and that. Our trip to the frozen northland - or Aviemore as it's better known - went well. There was snow aplenty all around and the weather was gorgeous. We chilled and took in some sights and did very little else.
We did take the opportunity to go and see my Dad's older sister, Aunt May, who is 87 and lives on her own in a small village near Elgin, which is only about 40 or 50 easy minutes drive north-east from Aviemore, rather than the 4 hours non stop from home. It was lovely to see her again and to find her in such good spirits. She has always been fiercely independent and is very self contained even though she is far from family where she is. We spent an enjoyable and, for me, thought provoking couple of hours with her and her beautiful and sociable cat.
The Spey, provider of salmon and fine malt whisky.
The Cairgorms, still deeply in the grip of Winter.
We went to Inverness one day, to see an ex colleague of the lovely G, driving past Culloden battlefield, which I always feel a sentimental pull towards, and returned laden with bounty from her new shop. Evenings were spent with good food, easy conversation and a few local ales - well, you have to support the local economy don't you? We took a drive one day up to the infamous Tomintoul, which is the place where UK road reports most often advise as cut off by snow and found that one of the main roads in had only been opened four days before we got there after several weeks closed. The lady in the local shop described how the snow plough couldn't clear one of the roads in to the village and they had to bring down a snow clearing machine from one of the ski slopes as some of the drifts were 14ft deep.
A corbie {crow} lands on a neighbours lum {chimney}
We got back a day earlier than originally planned as the cattery had called us to say that Jess had stopped eating after a couple of days and they couldn't get her to eat anything they offered. After a further couple of days of this she was taken to the vet and given a check up, some appetite stimulant and some vitamin E jabs to help. We found though that when we got her home she began to eat and now, after 3 days at home, is back to normal. We think it was a reaction to being on her own for the first time - bailey had always been with her before, and since Bailey died she has never been without me around the house for company. I hope it's not going to be a problem for the future though.
Light on the stream
The return also brought about my birthday - thanks for all the greetings on that folks - and as usual I got spoiled rotten. Unfortunately a family dinner on Sunday had to be postponed when the lovely G's brother took ill, but hopefully he is on the mend now. Feels like it was one of those nasty bugs that do the rounds every so often.
Fast Castle Head from the beach path.
One of my birthday presents was a replacement battery charger for my canon EOS camera. The original has gone missing and I can't find it anywhere. Still, now I have a camera again I hope to get out and about and take some shots of some of my favourite places around and about this lovely part of the country, especially now I have got myself a decent zoom lens to play with. I have been lacking any relevant photos to put in the blog sometimes. I think its great to show the places and time your talking about when you can and I've really missed having my camera.
{that'll explain the overkill of photos on this post!}
Bush on the way to the rocky beach
The start of the week is going to be taken up with my monthly duel with job center to make sure we get the insurance claims authorised - all the paperwork needs to be in tomorrow or Wednesday, and also with getting some info back to children's panel for my reappointment, as you have to go through background checks every 3 years when you are involved with children and vulnerable young people. I also have a couple of job applications to prepare for. I'm having another crack at the parole board as they are going to be looking for more members due to legislation changes too. So all in all a busy few days ahead. Hopefully there will still be time for the odd blog or two as well.
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