Sanna on Macro

We walked for three hours around Sanna this morning, starting at the southern end of the township. The weather remains grey and cool, with a light wind which brings occasional thin drizzle. These aren't ideal conditions for photography except...

....that Sanna's beauty isn't only in its spectacular beaches.  In a depression in the machair at the back of one beach we came across a concentration of wild orchids which rivalled those in the little glen near Bourblaige, post here - except that, if anything, today's discovery offered an even greater variety of colours.  This one, and others close to it, are probably the reddest orchids we've ever found, but....

....others nearby varied through pinks even paler than this one to....

....violent purples and....

....delicate lilacs.  So the camera setting stayed firmly on macro while we walked from flower to flower, calling when we discovered another, even more glorious than the last.

Most appear to be northern marsh orchids, but this lilac one is a common spotted.

We wonder who else has seen this particular garden of orchids - it covers an area of no more than 50m by 50m - or whether most people walking down to the beach simply miss it.  This is the first time we've stumbled upon it, and we'll know to come back in the future.

Wandering along the tideline always producing something of interest, and today it was the first moon jellyfish of the year, mostly small ones, a sign that the sea is, at last, beginning to warm.

The camera came off its macro setting briefly for this little ringed plover before we left the beaches at their northern end....

....and crossed the Sanna Burn by the bridge, looking back at the cluster of white-walled houses that forms the township, and at Meall Sanna beyond it.

The open muirland to the north of the burn had plenty of spotted heath orchids a short time ago, but these seem to have given up on the unequal fight against the weather, and the only orchids we found were a couple of fragrant orchids, the first of the year.

One final indicator of the approach of this grey midsummer was the first heather flowers.  At present, their purples seem a feeble attempt to rival the orchids' - but wait until September when all the heather varieties are in full flower across the hills.