Beyond Ockle

We walked along the track to the east of Ockle today, leaving our car at the small car park next to the bridge over the Ockle Burn.

About a kilometer along the track there's this very distinctive cairn, where we turned down to the sea, the object of today's expedition being to explore the coast to find caves - we're still trying to work out which is MacIains Cave, where the clan's women and children were massacred in about 1625.

In all, we found five candidate caves.  This is the one we used to think was MacIains Cave....

....and this is another of the five - Bedw wasn't allowed to go in them, but....

 ....the humans did venture into all of them.  Four of the caves could have each held a few people, but one, which had a very restricted entrance and we'd already written off as being unlikely, opened up into a cavern in which there's room to stand, and could have held up to 100 people.

We may have been looking at caves, but we found plenty of other things to interest us.  This is the first white lousewart I've seen.  As with so any of the white variants in species, the leaves are distinctly paler.  There were three white-flowered plants close together in amongst several of the usual, pale purple flowered variety.

The local green tiger beetles were ensuring the continuation of their species, as was....

....a pair of cuckoos, this one being seen off by an angry small bird.

We reached the mouth of the Allt Eilagadale before turning back, a gentle walk in warm, dry weather.  The Ockle to Gortenfern coastline is spectacular, and it doesn't matter how often we explore it, we enjoy it more each time.

Ockle Holidays has three houses to let at Ockle - details here.