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We're back from our week in Drummore, five miles from the Mull of Galloway in Scotland: no street lamps, barely any people and the sea metres from the front wall of our tiny fisherman's cottage. Bliss. But there's always coming back; and my goodness don't we do life quickly! It's taken me a week to regain speed after experiencing the pace and easy lilt of conversation that gently soothes you through your day rather than the machine gun chatter that whacks us through our city lives.
Dumfries and Galloway, or more specifically Wigtownshire, is the forgotten part of Scotland. As one local put it as he chatted whilst I bought a bottle of Robinson's Cordial - an act that took some fifteen minutes, not because the shop was busy, just that everyone had something to talk about at the till, and time to do it - he said, "Everyone gets to Carlisle and heads North for the 'real' Scotland; no one turns left. And by not doing so they miss out on this mellow stretch of land that is gently warmed by the Gulf Stream, giving it some of the loveliest gardens in the UK - more of that another day.
What this little finger of land - the Mull - also has, is a variety and richness of birdlife I have never seen before. I must have looked like a yokel: constantly pointing and dribbling as I saw another previously unrecognised bird (that is unrecognised by me - not a brand new species). But they just kept cropping up: Gannets performing their dramatic hunting dives 100metres from our front window, Razorbills bobbing in the bay, Sandwich Terns (which I was delighted to be able to identify - birders will understand), Guillemots (Black and Standard). I could go on, but at the risk of alienating my non anorak wearing readers I will desist, anyway it's not good for a man of my age to have his pulse racing like this.
Anyway, we are back amidst the concrete and steel and right slap bang back into the fray - I won't bore you with the details; suffice to say it is enough to prevent me from having time to write much at present, the long gaps between posts at the moment.
It has been a while since I've wrote anything about nature, but I was reminded of Simon Barnes excellent book How to be a Bad Birdwatcher when Mrs C and I were chatting about her uncanny knack of spotting birds. I have been a fan of ornithology since a teenager, when I used to wonder down to Crime Lake near Failsworth with my dad's Carl Zeiss 10 X 50 binoculars, that weighed nearly as much as me, to spot Coots, Moorhens and other birds that, whilst common, I loved. On and off, over the years, I have returned to my hobby with varying degrees of enthusiasm; but I have never been a twitcher: I have never felt the desire to run half way across the country to see a rare bird that has arrived at our shores by sheer accident only, in most cases, to be eaten by the local Sparrowhawk. I have always delighted in the bio-diversity of wherever I happen to be at the time, rather than specifically going to look for something; and that is why I am a bad birdwatcher: I don't have to hire a sherpa to carry my array of optical equipment; I take the dog with me; and I point excitedly at things (usually scaring them off in the process). Mrs C. has come to birdwatching late, as much to humour me, I suspect, as to expand her existing interest in wildlife in general; but she has now embraced it with every bit as much enthusiasm as I and, what is more, she is damned well better at it than I am. Only yesterday, walking the dog near to Dovestones Reservoir, whilst I was doing my impression of the great hunter, silently creeping along the path with my binoculars, and seeing nothing, she suddenly stopped, pointed and said, "What's that on the side of that tree" - it was a Great Spotted Woodpecker, not uncommon, but I hadn't seen it. Simon Barnes' book is a book for people who are not impressed by the lore of twitchers but love nature, it is full of excellent tips to improve your enjoyment without having to buy an anorak.
Mrs C and I leave for a week in Keswick tomorrow; We are staying in a lodge on the outskirts of the town right by a river, so I hope to have plenty of nature notes to share when we return. Just as an aside, it's funny how in Keswick we are in a lodge, but effectively the same building was a chalet, at Pontins as kids, and a pre-fab after the war when people needed cheap housing stock (and in those cases post war pre-fabs are listed buildings with families still living in them).
I have two good books to read, so if it rains all week, as the forecasts suggest it might, you needn't worry about us; click here to see what I've chosen as my holiday reads.
We're back from our week in Drummore, five miles from the Mull of Galloway in Scotland: no street lamps, barely any people and the sea metres from the front wall of our tiny fisherman's cottage. Bliss. But there's always coming back; and my goodness don't we do life quickly! It's taken me a week to regain speed after experiencing the pace and easy lilt of conversation that gently soothes you through your day rather than the machine gun chatter that whacks us through our city lives.
What this little finger of land - the Mull - also has, is a variety and richness of birdlife I have never seen before. I must have looked like a yokel: constantly pointing and dribbling as I saw another previously unrecognised bird (that is unrecognised by me - not a brand new species). But they just kept cropping up: Gannets performing their dramatic hunting dives 100metres from our front window, Razorbills bobbing in the bay, Sandwich Terns (which I was delighted to be able to identify - birders will understand), Guillemots (Black and Standard). I could go on, but at the risk of alienating my non anorak wearing readers I will desist, anyway it's not good for a man of my age to have his pulse racing like this.
