2015-03-20 Day 17 Fri Portree – Struan

Today is the last day at Otterburn …

Tomorrow I move over to the mainland and Kingussie in the Cairngorms.

With luck, I am told, I will get snow, which I am actually quite interested in as I have never had the chance to photograph in any reasonable snow. As long as I don’t get miserable winds I can deal with the cold.

In the mean time I am going to visit a few galleries and then have lunch in Glendale with Digby and Rosemary. It’s early morning when I leave and although it’s a balmy 9 deg. C it is completely overcast so I don’t hold out too much hope for any decent light to photograph by today, but I decide to explore the last few roads I haven’t been on yet.

The sheep here, at least the smart ones who are still with us, have learned that they can exert “right-of-way” on the roads and often just stand there in the middle of the road and stare you down. Sometimes it takes a gentle nudge with the bumper for them to get the message ….

On the way down one particular little side road I spot what looks like an old church with an interesting door so I let myself through the gate to take a few photos … after a minute or so I move round the corner to see what else might be interesting … and discover the car, clothes line, “wheelie bins” and general paraphernalia of the average household. Oops! It would appear that someone lives here. Fortunately I don’t appear to have woken them at 6:30 in the morning so I beat a hasty retreat

A few hours later I see a numbers of people standing alongside their cars in the light drizzle that seems to have developed in the hills I am travelling through and remember that a solar eclipse is happening this morning at about this time. With the cloud cover there is no chance we will see it but I pull to the side of the road and get out anyway. It is quite dark “again” so I imagine the eclipse is happening right now. As if on cue there is the smallest of breaks in the cloud, no more than about 15 seconds, but I have my camera with me just in case. This time I am lucky … the clouds are a perfect filter and I can look straight at it, at least for the few seconds required to get a photo.

Lunch is very relaxing and enjoyable but soon it’s time for me to head back to Otterburn. From now on Digby and Rosemary will be staying on in Glendale for a while and then on to Ireland and I will be heading over to the mainland so it’s fare well until we are all back in Perth.

I stop off in Russel Sherwood’s photo gallery and we gasbag for a couple of hours … he has some nice images. Also in the Raven Press Gallery where they make woodblock prints and while I appreciate the skill and ability involved it’s not really my thing.

On the way back I come across a few pastoral scenes of no great drama but I find them pleasant and a bit of a change from the majority of the landscape.

There aren’t too many places in Skye where there isn’t a bloody big hill sticking up in the background somewhere ….