Snowdrops 2021

 The first snowdrops of 2021 have appeared on the Boggy Brae. They are under an azalea on the steep, northeast-facing front bank and it is this group that appear first every year.

The Tamarisk moss through which this one is growing is looking good too

On the southeast-facing part of the bank, there is a primrose plant that has not stopped flowering since last spring. Near it some others are looking promising.

Bike ride to Faslane Cemetery

We can’t keep up with the Joneses 😉 but we had an enjoyable ride yesterday morning in pleasantly cool and breezy conditions. Faslane Cemetery contains memorials to the crew and builders of submarine K13 that sank in the Gare Loch in 1917.

We wandered around the rest of the cemetery reading names and stories. Perhaps I should say imagining stories. It’s not hard to imagine some tragic storyline when you read of several deaths of infants affecting one family.

I wondered what relation Gertrude and Marie Louise bore to each other on the gravestone pictured below, as well as loving Marie Louise's full name.

Riding back it struck me how much of the signs of spring I had missed in Garelochhead by travelling to work all through lockdown by car. I’ve sometimes considered cycling but decided against it on the grounds that I wouldn’t have energy for that as well as for the extreme gardening I need to do at home!

The pic below shows expanses of scentless mayweed that are visible this year on the tidal marshes at Garelochhead. This is one of the results of someone’s epic cutting last year of the Japanese knotweed that usually pretty much smothers everthing else. I hope it is kept under control in future years. 

The final pic is looking down the loch. You might be able to pick out a green field above the small, rightmost boat. Home is next to that field.

Note: I’ve often wondered why Gare Loch is so often referred to as the Gare Loch (the Gareloch). I think it’s perhaps an easy way to distinguish it from the town of Gairloch in the North West Highlands.

Cycling on Great Cumbrae

Went full Norwegian today to Largs and then onto Great Cumbrae again for a bike ride. Lovely cold day but four layers of clothing and three on my head meant I was toasty. We went up one of the inner island roads (there are two) and the bikes and we got a bit clarty coming down to the ferry slip because the road was muddy after some hedging activity. I'm still in shock cos Toad not only washed the car when we got home but the bikes as well!! Shoulda seen him with the pressure washer! Is washing bikes even a thing? Anyway, it's fine by me for someone else to keep my bike all shiny.

Third pic is what we decided is Cumbrae's swimming pool. 

Arran (pic 4) stayed cloud topped but pretty all day.

Rain later

This morning I woke to a starry, clear sky. The weather forecast said "rain later" so I cycled to work thinking that it wouldn't matter if I got wet on the way home. There was a ten percent chance of rain when I would be on my bike. Toad and I have often interpreted that ten percent chance, as the met office call it, to mean that we'll be in the raining ten percent of Argyll. This interpretation works well. Today I took a chance based on the clear and starry, crescent moon lit sky and got wet, well, damp. Hey ho.

Based on the weather forecast I expected to get wetter cycling home but as it happened the 40% chance of rain for that later time meant that my cycling home period was dry. So I had a chance to stop and chat to a raft of eiders on the loch. They were very chatty. There was even a wedge of blue sky over to the north-east.

 

It was light enough not to need bike lights by then but I have pinned to the back of my Aran cycling jersey the back half of the reflective whatsit that Toadlet used to wear when walking to school in the winter. I also have reflective stuff round my ankles. I'm one of those strange, old-fashioned people who just wears ordinary clothes for cycling.

Even without that whatsit the light wool should be easily visible in car headlights. I have good bike lights too. Most drivers around here seem to know how to overtake cyclists properly but it never hurts to be hyper visible.

Of bike rides, rain-washed hills and bats

Yesterday Toad and I drove to the Pier Cafe at Stronachlachar beside Loch Katrine, stoked up on coffee and cake (well, Empire Biscuit in my case. I test them wherever I go if they look appetising enough. Stronachlachar's got 9.5 just trailing behind the 10-er at the Perch Cafe in Garelochhead. My gran's, which we called Grandma biscuits, are the benchmark against which all others are held), and set off in light rain to cycle round the Stronachlachar end of the loch and along the north side to Trossachs Pier where we would hop on the boat, Lady of the Lake, to come back to where we started.

At the start of the trail we met a couple in a pickup truck closing a barrier across the road. They said it was the first day in a week that they'd been able to drive out because of landslides blocking the road. We have had very heavy rain, even for Scotland, over the last week or so. The extent of the devastation became evident very quickly as we rode along. Toad, who had done this ride early in August, was shocked at the difference from the idyll he had seen just three weeks ago.



Officially the road was still closed to cars (it's a private road anyway so there is never a lot of traffic) but we carried on. We didn't meet anyone coming the other way until we were over half way along the twelve and a half mile track. Toad's phone app logging mileage actually recorded 14.77miles but officially the distance seems to be 12.5.


While we were still on the south side of the loch hillside scars from landslides on the other side were very visible. Flood plains had been well flooded too, leaving grass caught in trees and on fences. I hoped no-one had been in the white car (see below) when it got washed against the trees.



I recorded a short burst of the sound of this wee burn and tried to imagine the noise as land slipped and what had been small streams burst, quite literally, their banks.

It was still bonny looking down to the loch through the trees and the downhill sections of our ride, standing on the pedals and whizzing down at ~25mph, were great fun. Toad was impressed with my uphill efforts too. My recent rides to and from Garelochhead seem to have improved my fitness at that.

After half way we began to meet other cyclists coming the other way so readiness for braking had to be maintained during downhill whizzings. People starting at Trossachs Pier, where some had hired bikes, had been told that they wouldn't be able to cycle all the way to Stronachlachar. We told them they could.

Towards the end of our ride I enjoyed some moss banks of the kind that I remember reading about in poetic writing of old.

We had tea and scones at Stronachlachar when we disembarked from Lady of the Lake and I untied the string that I'd used for cycle clips because it was needed to tie the car number plate to Toad's bike on the back of the car. 

To finish off our day out we drove along to Inversnaid because we were so near. The noise of the waterfalls there was quite something and the view across Loch Lomond to the Arrochar Alps showed us how close to home we really were.

We then trundled, because I was driving (Toad never drives in a trundly way even when I wish he would so it's best if I drive bumpy roads) and happy to go gently on the single track road alongside Lochs Chon and Ard, back to Aberfolye and then homeward. There was a pause in proceedings when we stopped, along with a few other cars, to see if we could help dislodge an ambulance from the roadside mud. All that rain last week has created general mega-squelch once you're off road. Unfortunately a number of shoulders shoving together was not enough. The ambulance probably needed a pull by a tractor or some vehicle with a winch. Fortunately there was no-one needing hospital treatment in the ambulance at the time it got stuck. I think a boat ambulance had been sent to where help was needed instead. The sun had come out by afternoon and there was hardly any breeze so a New Zealander, an offerer of one of the shoulders mentioned above, and who had not had much weather luck during his Scottish holiday, decided to have a swim in the mirrored water of Loch Chon while he had the chance.

I don't often take alcoholic drinks because of medication I take for arthritis but I had a cider when we got home and slept like a log so wasn't aware of the bat in the bedroom until I woke up and opened the curtains. It had probably settled on the curtains so opening them disturbed it. I opened the windows too and after flying round and round the room  a lot it eventually went out by the window.

Windows wide to let out the bat

We know bats live in at least one of the walls of the house and a couple got into the house some years ago when there was a hole in one of the walls by the stairs after a bathroom pipe had been replaced. This time I think it must have crawled through elbow hole in Toadlet's room (damp plasterboard, teenage elbow; need I say more?). It's possible there's bat in her room too but she's still asleep.

Balmaha with Toad

Toad and I went to Balmaha today and walked through what is usually marshy ground to get to the eastern shore of Loch Lomond – a wee walk on flat ground that did my back (that I yanked painfully yesterday) good. Next time we'll take a picnic, although coming back to St Mocha Cafe and getting blueberry yogurt ice-cream and tea in lieu of lunch worked pretty well.

We loved seeing and really hearing (I was going to say just hearing but it really was really hearing) skylarks. Most of the plants we saw also grow on the boggy brae but it was lovely to see flowering rush. The first pic below shows how unusually unmuddy the muddy paths were. The hill beyond is Conic Hill, the name based on a Gaelic word meaning mossy. This was actually a hot day by Scottish standards. It was a good thing I'd woken my Tilley hat out of its long winter hibernation.

Birds on Bute

Yesterday Toad and I met up with other members of the Argyll Bird Club to go to Bute and do some bird spotting. We had views of Arran most of the day and no rain except for a wee spot or two early on at Colintraive ferry.

Arran from Bute

There is a (probably incomplete) list below of birds seen. I did not see every one of those, just most. The Water Rail and Coot were heard and recognised by others. At the Quien Bird Hide I seem to remember a moorhen in the reeds, but maybe that was the coot! Other people compiled the lists.

I did not attempt to take photos of birds, just of scenery, and some of these are below to give a feel for the sort of places we were looking for birds.

Scalpsie Beach

I enjoyed the different kinds of sand that the island has:

Shame about plastic everywhere but it was somewhat encouraging to see lichen and moss colonising the plastic rope handrails of the board walk over the mud to the hide at Quien Loch.