The Weather Clears

There was a quite different feel to the weather when we went out this morning and looked across the Sound towards Glengorm.  The wind had dropped, but moved further into the north, so it felt colder, and there were pockets of snow on the ground.  And the power had stayed on all night.

Needing a breath of air, we set off for Sanna for a brisk walk along the beach.  This picture was taken at the small bridge just past Creag an Airgid, looking up the Allt Uamha na Muice towards Meall Meadhoin with a dusting of snow on its flanks.

The change in the weather was evident at Sanna, where the waves coming in to the beaches were mild by comparison to the descriptions of the last few days.  This picture looks towards Portuairk.

A pair of stonechats were working through the seaweed brought onto on the beach during the week's storms, the male still in his summer plumage, the female in her usual drabber colours.

Near them an orange had been blown from the beach up onto the machair.  One wonders where it came from - thrown overboard from a passing vessel, the leftovers from an unlikely winter picnic, or carried across the Atlantic from the Caribbean by the North Atlantic Drift?

An orange on a Scottish west coast beach always reminds me of Fulton MacKay's role as Ben Knox in Local Hero, partly filmed at Arisaig, in which he offers people an orange from a  box he found on 'his' beach.

The gulls and oystercatchers looked pretty fed up after the recent weather, tucking their heads into their shoulders and taking their time to fly off as we approached.

Near the mouth of the Sanna Burn we saw this goosander, a female.  There was no sign of a male nearby.  It's some time since we last saw one of these fine birds.

By this afternoon the weather had improved enough for sun had come out in Kilchoan, catching Ben Hiant's capping of snow and the houses strung out around the bay.