Ash on Scout Scar, 21 February The Living Mountain is full of glorious winter light. I promise myself another chapter of Nan Shepherd later in the day.
Bird song carries on a still morning. The yaffle of green woodpeckers, chaffinch and great tit, robins dominant. I listen for skylark. Any time now they'll return to Scout Scar. I know not to expect their song-flight until they've settled in, learnt their song again. Perhaps there's a tentative skylark phrase- I can't be sure. The weather forecasters warn that a blast from Siberia is coming our way so that will be a shock for wildlife. Today is mild and balmy.
Bird song carries on a still morning. The yaffle of green woodpeckers, chaffinch and great tit, robins dominant. I listen for skylark. Any time now they'll return to Scout Scar. I know not to expect their song-flight until they've settled in, learnt their song again. Perhaps there's a tentative skylark phrase- I can't be sure. The weather forecasters warn that a blast from Siberia is coming our way so that will be a shock for wildlife. Today is mild and balmy.
20 February: wondrous clarity and winter light. Sky a breath-taking blue. Billowing cloud hugs the snow-clad fells, their micro-climate. Next day is warm with lingering fog that masks the fells entirely. But when blue sky breaks through the effect on the ash trees on Scout Scar is striking. They glow a warm pinkish-brown and contrasting light and shadow sets them in conversation. It's a trick of the light and the season. Gone in a moment.
I wander off-piste, over rafts of limestone clitter, and discover a couple of new erratics- new to me, they've been here since the Ice Age came to an end.
I wander off-piste, over rafts of limestone clitter, and discover a couple of new erratics- new to me, they've been here since the Ice Age came to an end.
Home to Nan Shepherd and The Living Mountain. My reading room looks out upon a cloudscape that complements reading, my head in the clouds. ' A snowy sky is often pure green,' she writes. And it's this beguiling quality of winter light I love. My reading is all involved with today's weather. Moments of recognition where her experience mirrors mine, and eagerness to be out there in winter to look again. And to reread my blizzard and mountain- snow journals to see how I wrote them. She's elemental: on water, frost and snow. She brings the Cairngorms vividly alive. It's wonderful to be so caught up in reading that you can't bear the chapter to end.
Nan Shepherd takes me there. A summer's day with heathers in bloom and the hum of pollinating insects: the place of heathers with bees, butterflies, common lizard and green tiger beetle. In deep and dreaming deeper. In the afterglow. my days in the heather become indistinguishable from hers. A summer night on the bare mountain in her beloved Cairngorm? I shall be out at sunrise, silent and still, pressed against Scot's pine and waiting for the crested tits to come down from the crown of the tree.
Siberian weather comes from the south-east and dawn comes with flush of rose through green and grey-blue. My camera resists a green sky as counter-intuitive. But we know.
Nan Shepherd takes me there. A summer's day with heathers in bloom and the hum of pollinating insects: the place of heathers with bees, butterflies, common lizard and green tiger beetle. In deep and dreaming deeper. In the afterglow. my days in the heather become indistinguishable from hers. A summer night on the bare mountain in her beloved Cairngorm? I shall be out at sunrise, silent and still, pressed against Scot's pine and waiting for the crested tits to come down from the crown of the tree.
Siberian weather comes from the south-east and dawn comes with flush of rose through green and grey-blue. My camera resists a green sky as counter-intuitive. But we know.
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