Backblip 8th October: A slow day

I noticed several trees bearing what appeared to be sloes when we took our first stroll on arriving on Tuesday. Since then I had been itching to return and check my identification and pick, pick, pick.

Saturday had been sketched out for walking to Dalbeattie and checking out the shops. By the time that breakfast came around we both had expressed a disinclination to walk very far as we have both been overdoing it a little and have aches and pains to prove it. We elected to stroll up to the viewpoint and to pick sloes on the return.

I love sloe gin though most of my experience of such was as a girl, forced to sit for what seemed like aeons, pricking berries endlessly... but never allowed to taste the eventual outcome.

We shall got to Dalbeattie on Monday and hope that the Co-op will have gin supplies.

Sloes alway bring to mind that most wonderful of lines:

It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. 


It wouldn't surprise me at all if Dylan Thomas also enjoyed  a nip of sloe gin from time to time...


I'd had another foraging adventure planned but as we came down the path with our fruity bounty... someone else was picking the Chanterelles that I had noted the day before.