Up the Glen ...

When we first moved into Dunoon from our first house over here, which was a council house that the school used, I was delighted to find the Bishop's Glen more or less on our doorstep. Actually it was ten minutes' walk up the road, but the fact that I could find myself beside the water with the hills around me when I took a child for a walk with the buggy seemed to me to justify the whole palaver of moving here with a new baby. And our church was right at the entrance to the glen - what more could a body ask for? It is, of course, the site of the town's former reservoir, which is what it was in 1974 when we arrived and which I could remember from visits "Doon the Watter" in my childhood. The boys used to like looking at the tadpoles - and then the frogs - in the upper reservoir, and we would sit among the trees and have picnics as well as picking brambles and blaeberries under the trees. Now our water supply comes from Loch Eck and the upper reservoir has been returned to its natural state as part of the glen, but the lower loch has been left, with its dam and spectacular waterfall at the east end, and fishermen share it with the ducks and occasional swans.

All that history is to explain the background to our walk today - taken before a late lunch, because the weather was set to deteriorate and the morning was rather lovely. We started off at the church - my first photo, taken from the graveyard, showing the westerly aspect of the building, and walked up the south side of the glen to the furthest up of the bridges and down the other side. The second photo is of a lone angler on the shore, and the third looking down the loch to the dam at its exit. It was just over two miles and hilly enough to make us feel ...well, a tad puffed. On the way down we met a quartet of people with a dog; the man greeted us with the information that he was seeing all his old teachers in one morning, having seen Mrs G further down the glen. It was all very jolly and entertaining, not least because Mrs G was always "Miss" but even though pupils called us all "Miss" when they were addressing us, she was never married. But it is fun to have these cordial relations with half the population of the town ...

After lunch I decided that if I didn't get any seeds I'd not be enjoying the plant pots on the patio this year, so I marched off in the first drops of the promised rain to the hardware shop on the outskirts of town to buy some, getting reasonably soaked on the way home. It's a shame we can't get decent weather in longer periods - these short bursts of sunshine are most tantalising. And there wasn't the slightest chance of seeing any sign of the sun's eclipse; it had vanished long before the moon did its thing. 

We have to be up and finished with breakfast early tomorrow: the Gas Man cometh.