Paul Howes comes up from England at least once a year to stay at the tiny settlement of Ockle on Ardnamurchan's beautiful north coast. He's both a great walker and a keen photographer, and this isn't the first time The Diary has had the privilege of carrying Paul's pictures. The first is of a sunrise across Loch Linnhe, taken from the Corran Ferry looking northeastwards towards Fort William.
Paul came across this pebble construction at Acarsaid, which is at the end of the wild headland which protrudes from the north coast to the east of Ockle (see map link at bottom of this blog entry). It's about six metres square with a raised plinth inside about two metres square, the walls being about a metre high. It's an intriguing structure - we'd welcome suggestions as to what it was.
The beautiful beaches of the Singing Sands at Gortenfern are one of Paul's favourite haunts. Here, the wind has used the tips of the grass leaves to draw patterns in the sand.
The metamorphic hills to the east of Ockle are a wild, lonely places moulded by the great glaciers that covered the area about 10,000 years ago. Paul's picture shows an erratic, a lump of rocks moved by the ice and then dumped, quite often in an elevated position. Geography teachers show their bored students pictures of this particular type of erratic - it's called a 'perched erratic'.
All good holidays have to come to an end, and it seems appropriate therefore to finish with Paul's photograph of a sunset from Ockle.
Many thanks to Paul Howes for the pictures.
A map of the area is here.
Paul stayed at one of Ockle Holidays cottages, website here.
Dochie says it is a stack yard ,the middle bit was where the big stack of hay was placed after bringing in the hay from the smaller ricks in the field. The outer wall was to keep the cows away from the hay before it was handed out to them for winter fodder.
ReplyDeleteThanks for that Dochie, I thought it was some sort of Kilchoan religious plinth for the sacrifice of young virgins to stem the Kilchoan sunshine
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