Three Otters

Three otters playing in a fresh water pool close to the coastline in Ormsaigbeg.

Lyanne Docherty

It is with great sadness that the Diary has learned that Lyanne died in hospital in Glasgow on Wednesday 18th March, after a long illness.

Lyanne was brought up on Eilean Shona and Acharacle.  She attended Acharacle Primary School, The National Centre of Excellence in Traditional Music at Plockton, where she learnt to become a very talented fiddle player and singer, and Ardnamurchan High School.

After leaving school she worked in a number of hotel management posts in Edinburgh and then moved to live in Kilchoan where she was the chef at the Kilchoan Hotel. On leaving Kilchoan she moved to Paisley.

Lyanne's funeral will take place at Cardross Crematorium on Friday 27th march at 1.15pm. All friends are warmly welcomed.

Mairi and Andrew and all the family are very grateful for all the messages of sympathy they have received.

Low, Low Tide

With the sun and the moon in line with the Earth, the tides have been exceptionally high and low - hence the problem with the Tobermory ferry, which had to be re-timetabled yesterday and Friday.

Richard Houston has sent in this picture of Glenborrodale Bay, with Glenborrodale Castle in the right background, at dead low tide at about 12.30 midday yesterday.

Many thanks Richard for the photo.

Unique Double Eclipse

While all the rest of us were getting very excited about Friday's eclipse of the sun, Portuairk was witnessing something even more unusual - a double eclipse.

This isn't in any way a trick photograph, it wasn't photoshopped or in any way digitally manipulated.  Jim Caldwell, who took it and was kind enough to allow the Diary to publish it, says it was one of a sequence he took on the day, and all the others showed just one sun.  Has anyone any idea how the image can have been generated?

Of course, anyone who knows Portuairk won't be in the slightest surprised. Portuairk is, after all, the centre of the known universe and is full of strange things.

21st Century Archaeology

Ardnamurchan Community Archaeology were out today at Branault Croft, continuing a study of the four cottars' cottages on Hugh and Bridget Cameron's land - but this time we were deploying the latest in modern surveying technology, Jim Caldwell's Phantom 2 quadcopter.

Branault's an ideal place for a first try as there aren't too many trees and other obstacles around, and the conditions today, with a light wind and sunshine, were little short of perfect. The results were very exciting.  This picture almost makes land-based surveying a thing of the past, as accurate plans of the cottage could be made directly from it.

The team today, from left, consisted of Wendy Macfadyen and the Diary, working the app on the iPad which controls the photography, and Jim Caldwell and James Dewar on the Phantom's controls.