Full Metal Wheelbarrow

This is the picture that Rob sold a copy of at the Festival :- Highland Lady

He had to creep up realy close to her to get this shot and I was rather concerned that he might get stompled! But fortunately she was very well-mannered and placid and he escaped with skin and camera both intact :-)

Rob has kindly given permission for me to post some of his shots, as he has more zoom on his camera and was able to get better pictures of the shags and oystercatchers.

( More birdies and coos )

A few more pictures today. along with some wittering about what we actually got up to :-)

Sad though it is that we've had to come back from our holiday, I can now proceed to picspam about it :-)

We were incredibly lucky with the weather. I mean incredibly - the ferry that docked on Mull on Saturday morning took over an hour to do so. Ours came in a few hours later with no problems at all and apart from rain on Monday we had fine weather all week.

Once again we were staying at Shore Cottage in the grounds of Torosay Castle.

( Here it is )
( Hielan' Coos! )
( Birdies and other stuff )

More photos and burbling tomorrow, when I get another batch uploaded. May include cute baby moos doing teddy-bear impressions.

We did get on the ferry eventually on Saturday, although it was a long and stressful wait. So much so that we had to go and have hot chocolate at the Oban Chocolate Company at one point.

We finally got to our holiday cottage at about 7pm, so we didn't have a chance to look around a huge amount on our first day, but then we didn't really need to, considering the view out of the front windows involves a beach and a castle...




We did trundle along the path in front of the cottage a bit and found a jetty - the cottage used to be the ferryman's cottage, so presumably this was where he ferried from - a boathouse and set of steps up to a headland where there was a big stone Celtic Cross that caught the sunlight rather nicely





And in the other direction was the railway station for the Torosay end of the small steam railway that runs between there and Craignure. It's only a mile or so of track, but has the distinction of being the only railway on the island. On Sunday we walked into Craignure along the coast path past the Celtic Cross (the railway station lady was horrified when we told her this) and came back on the train for a treat.



On Sunday afternoon we toddled around the gardens of Torosay Castle.

I took a lot of photos, but I'll try not to bombard you with too many of them. We really liked the gardens - they seemed to have just the right mix of formal and informal and some really nice plants. Not to mention a couple of rather droll stone lions. Alas, my photos of the Blue Himalayan poppies were not as good as I'd hoped.

But you've got to love a place that has Hielan' Coos at the bottom of the garden :-)


Right, this has taken ages, so more will have to wait for another post. Next time there will be owls. And possibly puffins.