The water in a burn, where it ruffles over stones

Describing the colour of someone's hair "...like the water in a burn, where it ruffles over the stones. Dark in the wavy spots, with bits of silver on the surface where the sun catches it" from Cross Stitch by Diana Gabaldon

Clyde Muirshiel Regional Park

To avoid close of business traffic across the Erskine Bridge, I headed early to Largs Archery Club yesterday, where I am going for some coaching and mentoring in my attempt to become an ArcheryGB Level 1 coach myself, taking the single track (with passing places) Old Largs Road across Clyde Muirshiel Regional Park so that I can do a little exploring on the way.

 Stopped at a little car park by Outerwards Reservoir to eat my sandwiches and went for a wee wander. There was a Dipper on the rocks top left of this photo but he bobbed away.

Outerwards Reservoir

A neatly made small weir above the reser. The stream is called Noddsdale Water.

An old gate post and newish stile

The bridge over Noddsdale Water, mended and "upgraded". The line of grasses and ferns marks its old top edge

Solid sandbag support underneath and some last year's seed heads

The wind was quite strong so I didn't manage to get a clear picture of the new larch cones but you can see them growing here

And, across the way, lots of young oaks with lots of oak apples, or galls

I spotted some more places to explore for next time. :)

That drain I dug

Where the moss grows here is constantly drippy – natural hill drainage.

The back garden is all above the top of this wall and the companionway steps

So I dug a drain along the bottom of the holding wall, around the corner and behind the eucalyptus wood pile,

made a hole between the terrace wall (I might knock some of this down when I'm in a sledgehammer swinging mood; some of it props up the den rose though) and carried on the drain

 down the hill

The drain seems to be doing a good job.

There is no moat (place to wash your wellies) at the back door

and the runnel along the front of the wash-house is relatively dry

– almost permanently damp counts as 'relatively dry' in Argyll ;-)

You can see from these pics that the back terrace is, technically, gravelled. All the mud has seeped down the garden over the years. It needs digging out and re-gravelling. Got my work cut out for a while.

A stream scramble

autumn colours

beech leaf bank

looking up a beech trunk

mossy rocks

An old wall

the top fifth of a silver birch tree; the rest is trunk

wee red fungus

moss covered pile of branches – hedgehog homes?

An old rowan tree

a jelly fungus

A bit of stream

and a bit of splash

light in water

light, water and bubbles