G & J away from home

Saturday, 2 July 2016

Morning

We woke up to daylight this morning; at 4am and 6am, and actually at 1.30am too, as it never really got dark overnight which was a little unexpected as I intended to check out the lighthouse working in the dark. I daresay I would have been disappointed had I been organised enough to set my alarm for the middle of the night so I could go outside and check this out.  As it was I woke up just enough to see it as still light and went back to sleep.

Since the trip in hadn't endeared itself to my unhappy gall bladder I wasn't sure about heading out either of the drives around the area that we had noted as possible entertainments so instead we went for a walk - a short walk for me over the rise to the lighthouse jetty (which is, I daresay, not as close as the lighthouse keepers might have wished) while Gary consistently took the longer, more adventurous route.  While I was taking photos of seals (close to shore but beyond the useful limits of my camera which did not stop me clicking away) he scrambled about on the rocks.

Gary on the rocks

He was looking very casual out there but was standing above a sheer drop to the stones below. (Bonus thought; would have been able to recover his body from stones but not when he was u to this above the water!)

Close-up of Gary's position

At least he had the sense to take ONE hand out of his pocket while he clambered around.

Gary clambers around the rocks

The jetty would have been used to land all the supplies for the lighthouse (if not as well being used for the building of the lighthouse itself) from the time the lighthouse was commissioned in 1910 to when the road (track) was put in from Melvaig in the 1960s.  The 'harbour' is no more than a gap in the rocks and can't have been very easy to negotiate, then once the boat was safely tied up the stores would have been removed by gantry and hand-winched to the top of the slope on a trolley.  It looked like a tough business but on our sunny morning visit I was able to find a very nice 'armchair' in the rocks and settled down to read while Gary explored.  (I'm re-reading Bella Bathurst's The Lighthouse Stevensons, appropriately enough, but am still on the exploits of this lighthouse engineer's grandfather, Robert Stevenson.)

The jetty and the ramp (Photo: Gary)

Gary disappeared over the rocks behind me and amused himself getting photos of the vivid green seaweed (I prefer to think that the close-ups are results of the camera zoom function) and rocks, before somehow doubling back to take photos from the top of the cleft down toward the jetty.  He also discovered the resting place of the winch.

Looking down to the jetty (Photo: Gary)

Looking out the cleft to the jetty steps (Photo: Gary)

The winch (Photo: Gary)

The rocks around here are big slabs of layered rock - and I just know anybody with a geological bent would know exactly what they were and how they were formed - but all at an angle.  It's hard to find a photo which shows the scale and amazing flatness of these tilted slabs but perhaps this one does the best job:

The rocks (Photo: Gary)

As well as investigating jetties and rocks and taking endless (useless) photos of seals we did manage to squeeze in a few photos of the lighthouse (us) and local wildflowers (me).

The lighthouse from the path to the jetty

Among the flowers was another great TICK for book references, in this case the small yellow flower in the grass around here is tormentil, the name of one of Elsie Oxenham's characters from A School Torment, The Testing of the Torment, etc.

Tormentil

Another 'flower' that's new to me and delightful is the bog cotton that is all over the place around here with its white seed-heads bobbing around in the wind.  It really does feel cottony though it's hard to photograph on my camera because the white is so very white.  (Note to self: learn more about the exposure settings on the camera.)

Bog cotton

As we drove up here yesterday I could see swathes of this stuff along the sides of the road and in the fields and am glad I've had the chance to find out what it is.

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