I love, She loves......

A nice day and decided to visit Kilravock Castle - I've often passed the entrance but never looked in. In fact it's never really promoted itself to visitors unlike the nearby and much more well known Cawdor Castle. In spite of being a bank holiday the place was strangely deserted and a lady I spoke to at first assuming she was part of the establishement turned out to be a lady who had lost a coven of women who she was meeting for lunch. Except the establishment had no knowledge of such an arrangement. So I put my cash in the honesty box and wandered round the gardens. I would have liked to get a picture of the castle from the banks of the river Nairn but unfortunately the intervening field was full of cattle and the odd bull so as I can't run very fast I chickened out and my only shots were looking up at an angle giving a strange perspective which was partly remedied in photoshop. The thing that hits you on entering the gardens is a splendid Chile Pine (Monkey Puzzle) with large nut cones growing up from the branches. The oldest tree is a Spanish Sweet Chestnut planted in mid-1600s. The leaflet explains that trees would not be planted round a "working" castle before that time because of the cover they would afford an attacker. There is a Sitka Spruce which in 2004 was recorded as being the largest in the British Isles. The image shows a "layered beech" which is probably around 350 years old and around the end of its natural life. The tree has branches which come down and "hit" the ground then start regrowing from there but it's not easy to capture in a photo as you need to be so far back. Instead I concentrated on a close up of the trunk which commemorates a good number of romances.