Shopping

We visit Fort William, the nearest metropolis, as rarely as possible, about once every six weeks. Today we left home at in the half-light at 6.20, caught the 7.40 ferry at Corran having met only four cars on the single-track road, visited two supermarkets, filled up with petrol, bought some windscreen wiper blades, had a haircut, took a photo of the Hebridean Princess anchored off the town, and arrived home in time for lunch.

Afterwards, a gentle wander up the burn that runs past the house is the ideal way to unwind. It descends steeply in a series of cheerful rapids and waterfalls, each....

....formed where the burn drops over a scarp of dolerite, the outcrop of a cone sheet of the Tertiary volcanic event which created Ardnamurchan's volcano. These outcrops runs roughly parallel to the Ormsaigbeg coast and, because the small scarps are almost south facing, they offer warm, sheltered spots for the....

....early spring flowers. So it's not surprising that it's here that, every year, we find the first violets. It's wonderful to see them, yet in a few weeks' time they'll be everywhere in the garden and we'll be pulling them up as weeds.

Some of the larger lumps of dolerite which have been incorporated into the field walls that surround the crofts offer good places to sit and gaze out across the Sound of Mull. The morning was perfectly still but by afternoon a light westerly was carrying in cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds with some heavy showers, so we sat and watched as the drifted across Mull.