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The burned-out mansion on the grounds of Clan Donald. If I had
been fifty years younger, I would have hopped over the barriers and explored the inside, warnings of danger be damned. Fortunately, age has brought prudence. (Slightly larger image, much larger). |
Tuesday, 7 May: a walk in the morning,
a visit in the afternoon
Today’s walk started out directly at the Lodge, and took us past woods that were well into bud, with lots of wildflowers in bloom. In the pair of pictures to the left, the first (big image, small) is the view from the front door of the Kinloch Lodge, and the second (big image, small) shows the usual marching order, with me bringing up the rear, Mark just before me, and all the others up there, some out of sight already at this early point of our walk.
There were lots of growing things to take pictures of, and I think that Mark was rather more active at this than I was. I’ll mention the flowering plants later on, but in the column to the right, there’s a fern, a lichen, and a slime mold, but both the latter two are different from any that I’ve seen before. As I recall, Pol told us the name of the lichen, but neither Mark nor I have remembered that.
We got very fine views of the bay, and I have three here: the two to the left are pretty much from the same vantage point, though the lower one was taken with my super-wide-angle lens, and really looks good in the larger views. The third one I especially like, and I’ve placed it below.
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| Slightly larger view, much larger. |
I’m always taken aback when I see a garden plant growing wild somewhere away from home, when here we’ve carefully nurtured it from seed or store-bought plants. It was like that to see Impatiens growing wild (as an imported invasive) in Costa Rica, or poppies in a wheat-field in Tuscany.
So, seeing (Lesser) Celandine (Ranunculus ficaria) and Primrose (Primula vulgaris) in the woods here gave me a little shock. First a close-up in the top picture to the left, then a view of a whole stretch of them. I also saw Foxglove/Digitalis (D. purpurea), identifiable from the leaves, but it wasn’t in flower yet.
We were getting nice views of the Sound of Sleat along much of this walk, and the four pictures to the right show some of them. I especially like the lighthouse in the upper left picture there.
Finally, in the row of snapshots directly below, you see some views of abandoned crofters’ dwellings, just the lower stone part remaining. In the first of these, you can see, especially in the large view, Pol chatting with two walkers, whom I don’t identify as members of our group, while Cari stands to the side.
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From then on until lunch, I took no more pictures except for the stop-frame video below; it may give a good feel for the extent of the Sound.
| Sound of Sleat (33-second clip) |
Lunch was al fresco: we sat outside the entrance to the Lodge, enjoying sandwiches. Then we piled into the vans for a trip to another of the holdings of Clan Donald, a big property with extensive gardens and an elegant mansion that unfortunately was destroyed by fire in 1855. I was rather disappointed that the beautiful huge exotic trees, mostly from the Pacific Northwest I’m sure, were not identified with tags. For some reason, I didn’t take many pictures, but this lack is remedied rather well on Mark’s page.
The block of pictures to the left represents almost all the shots I took this afternoon, except for the many attempts I made to show the ruin of the Mansion. The best of these is the picture at the top of the page. On the right, you see Mark getting ready to enter the gardens (big image, small). Notice the many daffodils, which are a wildflower here, and behind Mark, the large Chamaecyparis nootkatensis trees, which were some of the exotics I was referring to above.
My last two pictures for this page are a shot through a window-opening of the MacDonald Mansion looking to some other burned-out windows, and a shot of our room in the Lodge, as you see very spacious and comfortable.
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| Big image, small. | Big image, small. |
Dinner was elegant again, but for some reason, my journal says nothing about it. Maybe I was just too tired this day. Anyway, Mark’s page has lots of pictures and descriptions of what we ate. This was our last day at the Lodge, and I must say that we enjoyed the place very much. But tomorrow we would have a different adventure.