Inland

Yesterday I felt belonged to the sea and the shore. Today, however, we decided to escape the weekend increase, be it ever so slight, of people walking on the shore road, and headed inland, up the road behind the house and back onto the surrounding hills. 

In many respects, despite my photo, it was a green afternoon. After the gorse-strewn lower hillside just above the houses that run along the road at the periphery of town, the right-hand track heads into mature conifer forest that survive the tornado which devastated the slope to the immediate south. We followed a family - surely two families, from the numbers of adults and children - at a safe distance, praying that they would take a different path from us, until prayer was answered and they headed right, down the new timber track towards Ardnadam. Soon we were among the tall trees, still on a good firm road, still climbing. 

We've often noted how silent conifer forests are; there are no birds because there is so little growing on the ground in the darkness under the trees. Except from the odd movement as a ripple of wind swayed everything slightly, the silence was absolute. We came to an opening; an old watch-tower showed where someone, sometime, had looked for ... what? Fire? or game, pre-forest? The track turned left, climbed again ... and ended in a clearing. 

We sat there, on cushions of bone dry sphagnum moss, for a good 30 minutes. And round that clearing, there were birds, singing, moving invisibly around us. We could have been anywhere. We felt miles away from all that's happening in our messed-up world. 

As a last bit of exploration, we also wandered out onto the open hillside beyond the watchtower, where new trees had been planted among the stumps of an earlier forest.  We could see Loch Eck looking small beneath its encircling hills; below us the Holy Loch was blue and empty. Beyond that, the opening of the river where it turns into the Firth, and the distant tower blocks of another world, and all around the miles of trees of all sizes.

My extra pic is a rare capture of Mr PB at the turning-point of our walk, but the main Blip is of a tree on the way back down to Dunoon, with a hooded crow perched on the thin branch among the sparse buds. The sky is that amazing blue that I'm going to miss when it reverts to normal service. We'd walked 16,700 steps and almost 11 kilometres and found a new place to visit...

And I've referred to You Know What only obliquely. But I still need a dentist ...