LEJoG – Walking The Landscape

John O’Groats

‘I can see the sea!’ cried Miffy. – Dick Bruna, Miffy at the Seaside

A fisherman’s paradise

Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. – Ted Hughes

A short walk to a Proclaimers gig

I would walk five hundred miles. / And I would walk five hundred more… – The Proclaimers, ‘I’m Gonna Be’

In which we tick off an item from the Bucket List

Bradan à linne fiadh à frìth craobh à coille [Salmon from the pool, deer from the moor, tree from the wood] – from ‘Hymns to a Young Demon’, by Aonghas MacNeacail

We had spent a great amount of yesterday evening eliminating the midges from inside our tent: there had been huge swarming clouds of them, and if we opened the zips even a crack they would be unerringly inside. We woke to the same clouds of biting insects trapped between the tent inner and the flysheet.

Back in the Wild: the Strathvaitch and Alladale estates

Naysayers at their polite best chided the rewilders for romanticizing the past; at their sniping worst, for tempting a ‘Jurassic Park’ disaster. To these the rewilders quietly voiced a sad and stinging reply. The most dangerous experiment is already underway. The future most to be feared is the one now dictated by the status quo. In vanquishing our most fearsome beasts from the modern world, we have released worse monsters from the compound. They come in disarmingly meek and insidious forms, in chewing plagues of hoofed beasts and sweeping hordes of rats and cats and second-order predators. – William Stolzenburg, Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators

Continue reading Back in the Wild: the Strathvaitch and Alladale estates

The Longest Day: Summer Solstice on the Great Glen Way

Among the heathy hills and ragged woods… – Robert Burns, ‘Lines on the Fall of Fyers near Loch-Ness, written with a pencil on the spot, 1787’

Slip, heave, throw: The Great Glen Way

Slip is defined as the relative movement of geological features present on either side of a fault plane. A fault’s sense of slip is defined as the relative motion of the rock on each side of the fault with respect to the other side. In measuring the horizontal or vertical separation, the throw of the fault is the vertical component of the separation and the heave of the fault is the horizontal component, as in “Throw up and heave out”. – Wikipedia article on Geological Faults