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Near Kettlewell, 1974 |
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Great Whernside Summit Cairn, 1974 |
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Near Kettlewell, 1974 |
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Great Whernside Summit Cairn, 1974 |
This solid-fuel pocket hand warmer has been at the back of a drawer, unused for forty years. I thought it was something from the past, but surprisingly you can still buy them. I bought mine around 1973.
I fired it up for one last time.
These days you can buy
chemical hand warmers small enough to fit in a glove or sock. They look
like tea bags. Apparently, they are not that warm and don't last very
long. Mine gets quite warm and lasts all night. The only trouble is it
makes you smell like you have been standing on a railway bridge above
the funnel of a steam engine.
It's too nice to throw away. I'll put it back in the drawer for someone else to deal with. The kids won't use it. They are scared of matches.
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Upper Glen Nevis, 1975 |
New Month Old Post: first posted 12th November, 2016.
He was to be President of the United States, but across the North of England the word ‘trump’ remained an acceptable, almost polite substitute for the four letter word beginning with ‘f’ and ending with ‘t’ which to my mind is so coarse and common I can hardly bring myself to write it.
“Poo! Who’s trumped?” my mother would exclaim on walking into the room where my brother and I were playing. We might say that too, but if either of us had used the f-synonym we would have had our faces slapped as hard as if we had used that other f-word; not that we had ever heard either in those innocent times.
I was around eleven when I first heard the more common term for trumping. It came from an adult. We were on holiday near Southampton and had driven to London airport (not yet called Heathrow) to wave my aunt and cousins off to Aden. We waited inside a high glass-walled enclosure for their BOAC Britannia to take to the air, sheltered from the roar of the engines but not from the acrid smell of the fuel. It was close and stuffy, and the kerosene hung around us mixing with the pong from the clothes of a family friend who had been sick on the train travelling down with my aunt. To make matters worse my brother periodically kept discharging his own contribution into the atmosphere. We used to eat meat in those days.
I was mortified when another aero-watcher, a middle aged man, turned and forcefully told me to stop farting. I had no idea what he meant. The embarrassment stemmed not from what I had been wrongly accused of but from the fact that a complete stranger had spoken to me.
On another early nineteen-sixties holiday we drove to Devon in a hired Hillman Minx. It was a long journey from Yorkshire in those pre-motorway days, and as dusk fell we were still miles from our lodgings. My brother and I lay on the back seat comatose with headaches, trumping.
“Good God! It smells as if somebody’s babbered themselves,” complained Mum. I knew it was bad because she rarely blasphemed.
“Can we have a drink of water?”
“No. You’ll be widdling and piddling all the way. You’ll have pickled yersel’s before we get there.”
“I could do with a jimmy riddle myself,” said Dad from the driving seat.
Like most people from the South, my wife had never come across this usage of the word ‘trump’, but she soon picked it up, as of course have our children. It seems more humorous than offensive.
I am convinced it used to appear in a dictionary we had at Junior School. We used to look it up and giggle. “Trump”, it read, “a small explosion between the legs.” Perhaps I am mistaken because I cannot find it anywhere now. I am told, however, that the Oxford English has the definition: “to break wind audibly (slang or vulgar).”
But as for “President Trump”, to me it sounds more of a command than a title of high status.
My overriding impression was that, even after twenty years, the Charleroi region was still recovering from the economic privations of war. Hugo lived in a coal mining region in a house without mains water or sewerage. It was grimy and industrial – how I imagined parts of Yorkshire in the frugal 1930s.
Hugo’s dad took us on sight-seeing trips. We climbed the Lion’s Mound, a conical hill with a stone lion on top marking the site of the Battle of Waterloo. In Brussels we saw ‘le mannekin pis’, a hideous, two feet high, bronze fountain of a naked boy urinating into a basin. We visited the Atomium, a bizarre, futuristic, three hundred foot, nine-sphered construction in the form of an iron atom, a gleaming statement of post-war confidence erected for the 1958 World’s Fair.
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Charleroi Trams in the 1960s |
In Charleroi there was an old-fashioned street fair of a kind unseen in England since before the war. One stall was an ornately decorated fighting booth where all-comers were invited to challenge boxers and wrestlers for a share of the takings if they could survive three rounds. The Master of Ceremonies banged a drum and goaded passing men with accusations of cowardice and feebleness. This, together with the provocative posturing of the fighters, quickly collected a crowd which goaded and postured back.
Perhaps the crowd contained provocateurs to raise the temperature. Things started to become volatile. A scarred but muscled boxer looked much too intimidating for anyone to take on, but one of the wrestlers, a bald thin chap hardly bigger than me, with an effeminate leotard and ridiculous handlebar moustache, soon attracted a challenger who impudently threatened to pull off his whiskers. The pre-show was probably more entertaining than the fight itself – I don’t know, we didn’t pay to go in. Why oh why didn’t I take photographs?
Another stall had a platform with huge slabs of meat hanging from metal hooks, and a barred window at the back. A snarling black-faced wild man with a bone through his nose peered menacingly through the bars. The showman roused the crowd by cutting off chunks of raw meat and throwing them into the cage for the savage to devour. He then heated a thick iron rod in a brazier until it glowed brilliantly red, and seared it into the hanging meat which spat and sizzled as it burned, giving off clouds of rancid smoke. He reached into the cage with a meat hook, caught the wild man around the neck, violently pulled his arm through the bars, and rubbed the red hot iron hard across the palm of his hand to demonstrate his immunity to pain. Again, we did not pay to go in, but I wonder for how many years afterwards the stall was allowed to continue. In England by then, we were beginning to find the comparatively innocuous Black and White Minstrel Show rather objectionable.
On Easter Sunday we went to watch a noisy carnival at the nearby town of Fontaine-l’Évêque, where a procession of children, uniformed musicians and costumed characters, some wearing enormous papier maché heads, walked through the centre throwing treats to the spectators shivering in the rain and sleet.
I went out late one night after dark with Hugo and his friends equipped with buckets of paste and wallpaper brushes to put up “Marche Anti-Atomique” posters on noticeboards and any other suitable surfaces around the village, to the consternation of Hugo’s father who declared I would be deported if caught by the police. It goes without saying that we simply ignored any ‘défense d’afficher’ (no bill posting allowed) notices we came across.
Hugo and his friends also ignored the widespread ‘défense d'uriner’ notices, going about their business brazenly in full view of the road, even when caught in the glare of car headlights. But then, a country that has a peeing cherub as one of its main tourist attractions is hardly likely to have any inhibitions about urinating in public.
Hugo’s friends had no inhibitions about smoking and drinking. Neither had minimum age limits in Belgium, and teenagers openly did both without disapproval. A couple of friends flamboyantly smoked the local ‘Belga’, ‘Visa’ and ‘Zemir’ cigarettes, which came in paper packets of twenty-five at a fraction of the price of the cardboard packets of tens and twenties in England,. Like most European cigarettes, they had the distinctive, musty smell of Turkish tobacco, very different from the milder American variety in England. I took a couple of packets home for my dad. I don’t know what happened to them. I never detected their pungent odour in our house. I suspect my mother put them in the dustbin.
The street scenes in this a ten-minute video of Charleroi trams in the nineteen-sixties re-capture my impressions of the place very well. The same YouTube channel also has a clearer video (with sound) of the nineteen-eighties when it still looked much the same.
If you can't see it, the video link is: https://youtu.be/ma6xm-ztt8g
New Month Old Post (originally posted 12th September, 2014)
“What do you eat in England?” Hugo’s dad asked me in English.
“Food,” I said, trying to be funny.
He translated for Hugo’s mother and sister. Horrified, I realised I might have implied that what we were eating now was not what I thought of as proper food.
It was my first meal with Hugo and his family in Belgium. I was there on a foreign language exchange trip. Hugo’s dad seemed concerned that, not only was I having difficulty in understanding their French, but that I might also be unfamiliar with their food. They had asked whether I would like beer, wine or water to drink, and not being sure how to reply I had said wine. That was a new experience for me at fifteen. Had I tried to stand up I would have fallen over. Was I red because of the wine or embarrassment?
The food certainly was different. I can’t remember the details now, but there were a lot of meaty stews with lots of bread and weak fizzy beer or bottled water with every cooked meal. There were no familiar bowls of breakfast cereal, but thick chunks of bread and jam dipped into huge bowls of black coffee which rapidly acquired a disagreeable film of jam, butter and breadcrumbs on the surface. They enjoyed an unpleasant vegetable called “le chicon”, a kind of blanched endive with a bitter taste. In the days before ubiquitous international cuisine and mass foreign travel, food did differ across countries and regions. I was just going to have to cope with it. I was there for two and a half weeks.
Hugo and his parents lived in a square, average-sized detached house on a hill a few miles west of Charleroi. It was one of three or four on a busy road with an open valley at the back. The region was brown-field rather than green, the main economic activity being coal mining. Across the valley at the back was an open-cast mine from which a constantly moving, overhead bucket conveyor, carried coal past Hugo’s house to a railway somewhere across the road. Nearby, industrial buildings and black metal structures mingled with terraced housing in grimy cobbled streets.
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View Behind Hugo's House the spoil heap remains today, wooded over |
In 1974, I retired my trusty old Kodak Brownie Starmite camera, bought a Zenith E single lens reflex and switched from black and white prints to colour slides. The photographs from that time are still good, even after nearly fifty years. For example, here in the summer of 1974 is my friend’s Hillman Minx being unloaded by crane from the (turbine steamship) T S Leda at Bergen, Norway. It was the ship’s last year as a North Sea ferry before Roll-on/Roll-off came into operation on that route. You watched anxiously as your car was lowered to the quayside.
We had sailed from the Tyne Commission Quay at Newcastle. Only last May, I walked the half mile out to the end of the pier at Tynemouth, which I remember passing on the Leda, and gazed awestruck into the mouth of the Tyne, and at the even longer structure on the South Shields side. All still very much in colour, both photographically and in memory.
Now look at this one, taken at Scarborough in 2004, which I discovered when scanning in.
I found a web site, https://www.scantips.com/color.html, which explained how the slide below on the left had been restored to the two on its right, but despite playing around with Photoshop, I was unable to restore mine to anything like its original self. Some of the detail seems to have been lost. And you would need much better Photoshop skills than I have to correct slides that still retain colour in the centre but have lost it at the edges.
Thankfully, it’s only four boxes: we have over a hundred and fifty in all. Is it our fault, or did Agfa change something in 1974? I’ll probably never know.
The slides were from my wife’s camera. She changed to digital in 2006, as I had done in 2001. Here is her picture from last year of the iconic lighthouse at the end of Tynemouth pier, which I remembered seeing from the Leda. Underneath is how the piers look from the air. They shelter the mouth of the Tyne. Incredible!
Lots of things can go wrong with digital images, but loss of colour is unlikely to be one of them.
(first posted 11th November, 2017)
My dad was captivated by ships from childhood, when ocean-going liners were the most exhilarating machines ever built. He knew the names and colours of the British shipping lines and some of the foreign ones too: Cunard: red and black funnel, yellow lion on a red flag; Union Castle: also red and black funnel, red cross on a white and blue flag; Peninsula and Oriental: buff yellow funnel, blue, white, red and yellow flag. It was partly why we found ourselves on holiday near Southampton, the first time we had ever been so far from Yorkshire. Once there, it was inevitable we would visit the docks.
As we approached Ocean Terminal, three towering Cunard funnels told us the Queen
Mary was in port. Small boat owners vied for passengers to take to see her sail: an opportunity not to be missed.
RMS Queen Mary arriving at and departing from Southampton for the last time in 1967 (two videos, approximately two minutes each - click to play) |
We boarded a launch and sped off down Southampton Water leaving the
Queen Mary at the quayside. Any doubts as to why we had sailed so far
ahead were soon answered. “The Mary’s moving,” our own captain
announced, and within a short time she had overtaken us as smoothly and effortlessly as a huge white
cloud in a strong breeze, a vast floating
palace towering above. Her powerful engines were easily capable of 28
knots (about 30 miles or 50 kilometres per hour) compared to our 6 or
7. We were left bobbing like corks in her wake as she turned into the
Solent. Dad remembered the day for the rest of his life.
Snow is, of course, a – no, I can't say that; he isn't. Snow thinks of himself as a novelist [but] his incapacity as a novelist is … total: ... as a novelist he doesn't exist; he doesn't begin to exist. He can't be said to know what a novel is. The nonentity is apparent on every page of his fictions … Snow is utterly without a glimmer of what creative literature is … he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.Leavis continued the attack at length, giving examples of what he said was Snow’s characterless, unspeakable dialogue, his limited imaginative range, and his tendency to tell rather than show. Others jumped to Snow’s defence, suggesting it was in fact Leavis who could not write. It was brilliant, sensational stuff, still talked about decades later. Both academia and the general public, including my dad, soaked up the spectacle in pitiless delight, entertained by intellectual heavyweights slugging it out with metaphorical bare knuckles.
links to: introduction and index - next day
I have a lot of pictures like this, of people carrying rucksacks, although mostly in more spectacular surroundings. Actually, this is not as unspectacular as it first seems. The distinctive spire of Hallgrímskirkja, built in the image of the rocks, mountains and glaciers of Iceland’s landscape, reveals it to be Reykjavik. We are trudging from the airport bus to the youth hostel. Neville and I do not know the others yet.
Wednesday 24th August 1977
We underestimate the driving time to Glasgow. It leaves little time to spy on other rucksack wearers in the airport building. There are hardly any to be seen. Like us, they are probably creeping around in plain clothes trying to spot the others and weigh them up. The only one we see bears an uncanny resemblance to one of our friends, Gavin. It could be confusing if he is going on the trip.
As we assemble at the Air Iceland desk, a trekking company rep. arrives with a letter to Neville giving him responsibility for organising the rendezvous. They choose him because he has been to Iceland before. Good choice. He likes organising things and is good at it. All he has to do is make sure we all get on the plane and don’t get lost when we get off.
Our party is twelve. From the rendezvous responsibility list I see that six are on their own. There is just one girl. I am keeping quiet about the list. It is addressed to me as well.
As we wait at the departure gate, a choir of American teenagers begins to sing. Their harmonies ring around the large acoustic space, a magnificent sound, but thank goodness they’re not going on the walking tour too.
My first ever air flight. I can’t see out because I am in a gangway seat. Be careful not to let on it is the first time you have been in an aeroplane. Avoid displays of excitement. Do not lean across to take hundred of photographs. Do not gasp as the acceleration thrusts you back into your seat. Seasoned air travellers assume an air of detachment even when the ground appears over their shoulders at an alarming angle. Seasoned air travellers show no fear even when the plane is landing. So why do those American choir kids sound so scared?
After an evening wandering around Reykjavik, I can see why Neville has no intention of spending all day tomorrow here as well. You can’t even get a decent beer because of prohibition. He has therefore hired a car for a trip into the interior. It sounds preferable to visiting Hallgrímskirkja.
Nowadays you might also seek out elves, walk to the stainless steel sculpture of a Viking long boat, and visit the penis museum. No, you wouldn’t. You would still hire a car for a trip to the interior. Tomorrow: Thingvellir, Geysir and Gullfoss.
A series of 15 linked posts with photographs (index below).
It is 1977. We are strong, fit, active and in our twenties. We are about to go walking in the land of ice and fire. We will be flying to Keflavik (near Reykjavik) on Wednesday.
There follows a fourteen-part saga based on this notebook. It was an organised group walk, backpacking through a wild and uninhabited part of Iceland. I will post at intervals over the next few months to allow time to transcribe and edit, and select photographs.
I nearly didn’t go. When Neville and another friend first booked, I thought I couldn’t afford it. I was about to start university as a mature student and been told I would have to self-fund the first term because of a previous term on a course abandoned a few years earlier. I worked twelve-hour nights in a canning factory to save up. The local authority then told me I had been awarded a full grant, which in those days was far more generous than student finance now. So when the other friend had to drop out at the last minute because of work problems, I was in as his substitute. The canning factory money went on the Iceland trip and a high spec. stereo.
Who wears short shorts?
We wear short shorts
They’re such short shorts
We like short shorts
Who wears short shorts?
We wear short shorts
It seems there were times when lots of us wore short shorts,
such as AC/DC guitarist Angus Young and Everton footballer Gary Lineker.
So why do I feel the need to curl up and hide under the bedclothes at the sight my shorts in the French High Cantal in 1978?
I get a cringe attack just from the rest of the outfit alone.
And if that’s embarrassing, take a look at this, not a pair of shorts in sight.
Dare I scan in any more old colour slides?
(First posted 27th August, 2014)
“Billet?” “Votre billet, Monsier?” I will never forget the French word “billet” for as long as I live.
I had been staying with a Belgian family on a school exchange visit. They had put me on the right train at Charleroi and I had waved goodbye with feelings of relief and sadness: relief at no longer having to struggle in French and sadness because I had had a great time and would miss them. Having been there on my own for two and a half weeks, I was looking forward to being with English speakers again.
My French had improved enormously, although not enough to be entirely aware of what was going on. Sometimes things just happened without forewarning, such as going out sightseeing, or into town, or to the cinema, or to visit someone. You rarely knew what each moment would bring. At the age of fifteen it seemed simplest to cultivate an attitude of passive acceptance. It served me well that morning.
I was to join the rest of my school party at Bruxelles-Midi. After less than thirty miles, or should I say forty five kilometres because it was a Belgian train, the train reached Brussels and started to slow down. It came to a stop. I peered out anxiously to read the station name. “No, not this one,” I decided. It was Brussel-Zuid. Everyone else got out. I sat watching the bustling foreign platform, quietly waiting for the train to move on. It was a big mistake.
The problem is that Belgium is a two-nation country. There are the Walloons who speak French and live mainly to the south of Brussels where I had been staying, and the Flemish or Belgian-Dutch speakers who live to the north. The two nations are suspicious of each other, and, where they intersect, as in Brussels, signs are written in both languages to help minimise the antipathy. The station name, Brussel-Zuid, appeared to be Flemish for Brussels South. I wanted Bruxelles-Midi, which I decided must mean Brussels Central. I should have known better. Just rudimentary knowledge of French is sufficient to realise how very wrong this is. I must have left my French back in Charleroi in my eagerness to get home.
I knew something was not right as soon as the train started to move. The names on the station totems flashed alternately in Flemish and French, Flemish and French, Brussel-Zuid and Bruxelles-Midi, Brussel-Zuid and Bruxelles-Midi. With helpless horror, I realised they were the same station. The names switched in time with the clickety-click of the wheels as the train picked up speed. Not only do the two kinds of Belgians disagree about which language they speak, they cannot even decide what this particular station should be called.
‘Midi’ is of course French for ‘mid-day’. It is one of the first words you learn, as in après-midi, meaning afternoon. Because the sun is in the south at noon, the French-speaking Belgians in their wisdom call the southern station Bruxelles-Midi (Brussels Mid-Day). Where else would you find such logic? How come they were allowed to keep such eccentricities when we had to give up our shillings, pence, pounds, ounces, pints, gallons, feet and inches? They used to be perfect for bamboozling the French and Germans.
I was on the express train going north to Antwerp. Not only that, but all the other passengers now seemed to be Flemish speakers who might be unhelpful towards someone attempting to speak in French. I caught the attention of a smartly dressed but kindly-looking young woman sitting opposite me. With an awkward and badly modulated “Excusez-moi, Madamoiselle”, which stopped the conversation throughout the whole carriage, I asked anxiously in French whether the station we had just left was Bruxelles-Midi. Fortunately, she answered in a French accent I was able to follow. As the train shot through another station without stopping she confirmed that it was.
“Ce que je vais faire maintenant?” (What am I going to do now?), I asked with resignation.
“Descend ici” (Get off here) she said. It was a considerable relief to be told there was another stop before Antwerp, at Brussel-Noord (Bruxelles-Nord or Brussels North).
I left the train. This was a much quieter station. I sat with my luggage on the deserted platform. Before too long a train came in the opposite direction. I got on, sat down, and fiddled sweaty-handed with the ticket inside my trouser pocket. It quickly became an illegible, misshapen pulp. For all I knew, the train could have been going anywhere. I just hoped it was going back to Bruxelles-Midi and not straight to somewhere in Germany or France. As I said, if you were fifteen, on your own in Belgium in 1965, unable to understand much of what was going on, the only thing you could do was to adopt a position of passive acceptance. Psychologists call it ‘learned helplessness’.
Inevitably, a ticket inspector came. He was dressed in a smart dark uniform which gave him an intimidating authority that made me think of the Gestapo. I handed him the lump of papier-mâché that had once been my ticket. He screwed up his eyes as he examined it, then looked back at me, then back at the ticket, and then at me again, and with an air of complete disbelief said “Votre billet, Monsieur?” “Votre billet?”
“Billet” – it’s the French word for ticket.
I was lucky. He concluded he was dealing with an anxious young English idiot and let me get off at Bruxelles-Midi.
A favourite Derbyshire walk through the years, possibly a metaphor for life
(first posted 13th January, 2018, 1550 words)
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Seeking shelter: Fair Brook crags, 1974 |
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An abominable biped on Kinder Scout: spring 1975 |
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Hags and groughs on Kinder plateau, 2005 |
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The Kinder River: 1974 |
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Kinder Downfall (or should it be called Kinder Upfall?), 2005 |
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The derelict shooting cabin in Ashop Clough: 1975 and 2011 |
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Looking along Seal Edge towards Fairbrook Naze on the far right |
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Icicles on the Snake Path through Ashop Clough: winter 1976 |
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Fair Brook with Kinder Scout in mist in 1974, and clear in 2007 |
Ben Nevis across Loch Linnhe from Corpach |
I was a bit apprehensive when Mrs. D. and I set off for Fort William last week. It is thirty years since I was last there and when your age begins to begin with a seven you wonder what you can no longer do. Was I still up to walking in the Scottish Highlands? Did I have the stamina? Would my legs and back last out? How would I cope with the long drive?
I used to go there a lot. The first time was in 1964 with my parents when I took this shaky photograph of the Ballachulish ferry with my Brownie Starmite camera. The ferry avoided a nineteen-mile detour round by Kinlochleven which could take over an hour in holiday traffic. It was replaced by a road bridge in 1975, but the old ramps are still serviceable as the modern picture shows.
I went again on camping and walking trips with friends in the seventies and eighties. We pitched our tents countless times at Glencoe and Fort William, and passed through on our way to Skye.
We always walked the big stuff. We climbed Ben Nevis straight up the four thousand feet from Glen Nevis: up the steep grassy slope into the Coire Eoghainn corrie where we heard a cuckoo, then up the boulders of the right shoulder and on through the snow to the top. Much more fun than the relentless ‘pony trek’.
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Nearing the top of Ben Nevis from the south via Coire Eoghainn, 1974 |
We back-packed and wild-camped our way across Rannoch Moor which, unlike now, was practically empty of any other walkers. We traversed the ridge of Aonach Eagach in Glencoe, the scariest walk I have ever done, stupidly going around some of the pinnacles instead of scrambling over them. Even scarier than the Cuillin ridges above Glen Brittle in Skye.
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Paths along the Cuillin ridges above Glen Brittle, Isle of Skye, 1976 |
Looking East from Steall in Glen Nevis |
Looking West from Steall in Glen Nevis |
The Steall Waterfall |
Eas Chia-Aig Waterfall near Loch Arkaig |
Banavie: Neptune's Staircase |
Looking towards the sea lock on the Caledonian Canal at Corpach |
Lastly, for any bovine photographers out there, this is what you have to cope with on some of the quieter roads. Remember to fold your mirrors in.