The cliff tops were ablaze with colour yesterday.  The sun was shining, the sea was blue and the Thrift and Red Campion was in full bloom.   Wonderful!   It was quite a contrast to the morning when the haar was in, and everything was dull and grey.

Lily, Poppy and I made an impromptu visit to the Longhaven cliffs on the way back home from Peterhead.   I could not believe how colourful the cliff tops were, and the sea was positively Mediterranean blue.   But this was the North Sea.  We walked a little way along the cliff top path, part of the Nave Nortrail which aims to create, when complete, a 7,000 mile trail of coastal paths along the shores of the North Sea from Shetland, down the east coast as far as the North York Moors, then to the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Sweden, finishing up in Norway.

It had been a few years since I had been here, but I will definitely be back after yesterday.  There is a little car park just off the main road and an easy path across the line of the old Great North of Scotland Railway which opened in 1897 and ran from Ellon, through Hatton and Cruden Bay (promoted by the railway company as the “Brighton of the North”!),  finishing up at Boddam – a strange place for the end of the line? The railway closed to passengers in 1932.    No trains, but you can get a good view of the Buchanness Lighthouse through the cutting.

The path has been improved since last I was there, with bridges over the wettest parts.  I will have to try to walk further the next time and see if we can reach the Bullers of Buchan.  And an added bonus:  on our way back to the car I saw my first orchid of the year.

I have been biding my time, waiting for the bluebells in Dales Park in Peterhead to come into full bloom.  I tried a couple of weeks ago but I could see I would have to wait.   I also had to wait for light, hoping for sunshine.   In the end I made do with a bright overcast day on Saturday.   Perhaps that was best, there was not too much contrast between the bright sunshine outside the wood and the shady areas where the bluebells bloom.

It was well worth the wait, to see the carpet of bluebells under the trees.   I posted one picture yesterday on Facebook and had an unexpected response from one of my Facebook friends.  Bob Milne now lives in Upper Tweeddale in the Borders, but recalled his days working in local government for the then Banff and Buchan Council.

Many, many, years ago when I worked for the late unlamented Banff and Buchan Coooncil we took over this area and started to set it up as a wildlife park area. David Bellamy came and visited it in the early days. Nice to see it has turned out well.

I am an incomer to the Peterhead area and as often as I have walked in Dales Park, I had never thought of how it came into being.   Thank you Banff and Buchan Council!

The weather was great this afternoon as Mary and I went for a walk with the dogs at the Forvie Nature reserve.  Taking notice of the warning to keep dogs on leads during the bird breeding season, we set off through the dunes and past the little lochans than can be found there, one with a rather spectacular display of reeds.  Everything was dry and the May flowers making their appearance among the heather clumps and the dune grass.   Every so often we would spy a little bright blue dots of the violets beside the path and the occasional stalk of lady smocks.

Violet

Lady Smock

As we sat in the heather for a little breather, a lark rose up above us with its distinctive piping song.  Mary broke into song too, as she recalled a setting of the song from the Shakespeare play, Love’s Labours Lost.  She had taken part in a performance of the play when she was at teacher training college at Jordanhill in Glasgow.

I had been thinking about the same song a couple of days before, although I had said nothing, when I spied some lady smock flowers blooming in the Hatton field, but I could not recall all the words of the song.  I looked them up when we got home today:

When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he: 
Cuckoo; Cuckoo, cuckoo!”
O, word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

When shepherds pipe on oaten straws
And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks,
When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he: 
Cuckoo; Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O, word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

I had to look up the cuckoo-buds reference…buttercups.  All the elements were there with us today, daisies, violets, lady smocks, larks.  The one thing that was missing was the Cuckoo.   It’s been a long time since I have heard one, probably not since I was a teenager.   I wonder if they are still present in Scotland?

On the way back to the car Mary spied a woolly caterpillar racing across the path.  Poppy and Lily had a sniff.  I reached for my camera and another song, this time a children’s one came to mind:

Little Arabella Miller found a woolly caterpillar.
First it crawled up on her mother, then upon her baby brother.
They said, “Arabella Miller! take away that caterpillar!” 

I know nothing about caterpillar so it was back to the Internet.  Our little woolly friend will grow into a Tiger Moth.  In America they call it a Woolly Bear.

Tiger moth catterpillar

The countryside is  ablaze just now with the yellow of gorse bushes, such a contrast in tone to the much colder yellow of the oil seed rape which is starting to appear in the fields.  On our way back from Glen Esk last week we took a back road through from Laurencekirk to St Cyurus.  The sun was out, the sky was blue and the gorse was shimmering on the hillsides.  Shame I courldn’t stop the van and take a picture, but narrow country roads and stopping where you want to indulge your photographic urges don’t go together too well.   When I did manage to stop it was to take a picture of a lonely stand of pines at the op of a field of growing crops.

Yesterday when I was out with the dogs I looked for yellow.  Down by the little burn which flows past the Hatton Mill I saw some marsh marigolds (or do you call them king cups?).  Just further up the burn from where I stopped to photograph the flowers, there was another flash of yellow as a grey wagtail with its bright yellow breast landed on a stone in the water.  No chance of a picture though, since I did not have my big camera with me.  I was quite delighted to see it, we are much more used to seeing the black and white pied wagtails.

It’s not only gorse season, the dandelions are magnificent just now.  Perhaps we don’t welcome them in our garden, but a carpet of their bright yellow flowers at the roadside is a delight to see in the spring sunshine.   While I was down on my kneeds patking the picture of the dandelions, it was a yellow siskin which flew by and landed on a fence in the field.

There is plenty of gorse about in Hatton too.  It can make a lovely blaze of colour at the foreground of a picture.  This photograph was taken during an evening walk on the road to Easter Aquarney, near the Hobshill Trig point.  A rowan tree grows out of the flowering gorse, and if you look carefully enough you can see the moon in the blue evening sky.

Whenever I try to take a picture of grandchildren throwing stones into the sea I encounter two problems.   The first is that they will be standing with their backs to me as they launch their missiles into the waves.   I think the best pictures show the sea and unless I catch the children coming back up the beach to re-arm, the picture is of the back of their heads.  I have tried t getter a better view point by  scrambling on rocks or standing close to the sea, (often managing to get my feet wet in the process!) and picturing the subject in profile.

The second problem is a geographical one.  Here on the East coast the sun tends to be out to sea when we are on the beach and I am forced to take the pictures into the sun.   Fine for dramatic contra jour atmospheric pictures, but not the best to portray children having fun on the beach.   The only solution would be to move coast!

I have lots of contra jour pictures of the backs of children throwing stones into the North Sea.

It was very windy when we climbed out of the car at Whinnyfold yesterday afternoon, but the sun was shining and the surf was up.  The grandchildren loved it and I managed to get quite a few good pictures.

The way down to the stony beach is by a zigzag path with steps.  I remember reading a story by Bram Stoker, the author of the Dracula novel about this path. (He had a house in the village besdie the steps and knew the area well.)  The hero stood on a misty day at the top of the path as a procession of ghosts of seamen whose boats had been wrecked on the Whinnyfold rocks silently moved up the steps.   I thought I would tell the grandchildren the story, then thought better of it.  Lochlann does take things very much to heart and I suspect he would have had nightmares if I told him about the ghosts.

The waves were crashing over the rocks, and it is easy to appreciate how many boats would have e been wrecked here.  But today it was a source of dramatic seascapes.

For the children the agenda was throwing stones and exploring the beach.   They all seem to love this place and will ask if they can go to the “stony beach”.

Modern day fishermen drag their boats up onto the beach, above the high water mark.  This red boat provided a lovely splash of colour among the grey tones of the beachg.  It was also I great place to photograph children.

Another wonderful place is the “pirates’ house”.  It looks as if it had been a shelter for fishmen, but now locals have turned it into a delightful little hideaway, with widows to look out and spy the rocks and the sea.

The dogs had a wonderful time too.  I have decided that Poppy is a “rockhopper” dog.   There seems to be no rock, or cliff that she doesn’t want to explore. She even made it on to the roof of the Pirates’ House. And Lily does her best to follow on.   When I told Mary I though Poppy was a rockhopper.  Maisie was delighted and shouted “me too!” as she scrambled over the boulders on the shore.

Lily, Poppy and I were out for a walk in Peterhead yesterday before heading to the supermarket.  I parked the car in Buchanhaven and looked for a good place to go.   The sun was shining, the tide was out so we decided to make out way down to the rocks below.  How Poppy loves to scamper on the rocks.  It is something she has always done and because the pink granite was dry in the sun and not slippery at all Lily and I followed on.

From this angle we could see the Rattray Head lighthouse picked out quite clearly in the sun.  I had been talking to Fraser, my brother in law,  about this lighthouse a couple of weeks ago so I decided to see if I could get a picture.

With my camera out I soon found other subjects as we hopped from rock to rock:  an old broken bike, the familiar subject of oil supply boats, and of course shags sunning themselves on the rocks.   Mary and I were trying to remember the Shetland word for shags.  We had heard it on trips to Shetland but neither of us could remember.  Thanks goodness for the internet.  The Shetlanders call them Scarfs  (from the old Norse skarfr).

Unperturbed by ornithology or etymology,  the dogs followed their own agendas.