After what may have been an unnecessary rest day in Culloden (although I did enjoy it) and a "lost" day at Ferry View trying to work out what the heck to do next, it was day five of my holiday before I feel it really began. The uncharted waters - well that is because I was travelling across Caithness and Sutherland's "Flow Country", a landscape I had read about but no amount of pre-trip research could have prepared me for the amazing experience. If you have a look at the website I have linked to I hope you find it as fascinating as I did.
In the far distance a large herd of deer hung about completely uninterested in the tourists but they were too far away to show up in this picture:
One of the many, many places I stopped, "just because". If you think doing a trip like this in a small metal box for two weeks is hard, spare a thought for the countless cyclists I saw doing LeJoG:
This is a beautiful, staggeringly empty, bleak, wild, otherworldly landscape and I cannot wait to get back there; looking online once I returned home I can now see how much I missed (so perhaps all the pre-holiday research and planning I usually do is not such a bad thing). For probably the first time since Daisy died, I wanted my "big" camera. Whilst the iPhone is great at many things it just cannot do justice to the granduer and scale of this area .
I went along "the flat bit at the top" retracing a little of my route from yesterday and then turned left giving the Orkney islands and the sea a last fond look.
Not long after I turned south I came around a corner to this sight:
Rubbish photo, if you look up An Caisteal (Ben Loyal) on Google there are jaw-dropping pictures of what this magnificent lump of rock can look like in different weather with a different camera. It made my heart soar and reminded me of one of the many reasons we ended up moving to the Lake District. Just love mountains.
Much of my journey across Sutherland was a living geology lesson through features carved hundreds of thousands of years ago by glaciers, and spotting arétes, corries, moraines and drumlins. As if I did not already have a "must study more" pile which is likely to outlive me, not for the first time I want to go and revise my geography & geology studies from decades ago.
And that is how my day continued, mile after mile of this:
Beautiful wild country. I do hope they get the world heritage site nod. The bogs of Ireland captivated me, a similar expanse of strangeness that really transported my mind to mythical places.
ReplyDeleteSue, that is a ~great~ point about peatbogs in Ireland - if you go back to Doggerland then there was (most likely) just one landmass so the similarities make total sense.
DeleteThere are clear links with neolithic monuments in what we now call Scandinavia which are older than Orkney and northern Scotland, which in turn are older than those in Ireland and the south of England. Migrations west from what we now define Europe would make sense of that.
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/doggerland/
Blue Bus sits beautifully into all the landscapes you take him to, never looking out of place for a moment.
ReplyDeleteThank you Sue, my Blue Bus certainly did look at home in these surroundings :-)
DeleteThose views are incredible, especially Ben Loyal. One day...
ReplyDeleteI do hope it is not too long for you Jules, I think you would love it.
DeleteSue's right about Blue Bus sitting so well in the environment!
ReplyDeleteThe scenery is Sutherland really does look spectacular. xxx
Sutherland was unbelievable, so other-worldly, I definitely want to go back and stay for longer.
DeleteThank you
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome :-)
Delete