catspaw

Temporarily in lieu of the 'wot I did on my holidays' post, which I will get around to, I swear, once I sort through all the impressions and thousands of photographs (okay, not really thousands, but a lot) --

nicci_mac and I went out on a jaunt today :-) It was a lot of fun, as usual, and the time went by in a super-fast flash, and we laughed a lot, as usual, and talked about squilliards of different things, as usual... *g* We went to Dollar Glen and Castle Campbell, just a few miles shy of Stirling. The weather was glorious, after a fairly unpromising Embra start (dull and cloudy meh, so much as usual), although there's still a bit of a chill in the air *g*. I took photos.

We drove up and got there about lunchtime, so the first thing we did was have our picnic. Sandiwches and a lovely retro flask of tea :-) It was such a beautiful day and the trees were just breaking out all over with Spring, so I took a photo of the sky:

See? We do get decent weather in Scotland sometimes LOL

Thus fortified, we set off through a trek through the Glen. It's not wide, but it's deep, and therefore steep - in places, the drop is nearly perpendicular, and you're disconcertingly walking above the tops of the trees that are growing next to the burn at the bottom. It's a pretty lively walk in places ;-) Photos can't really do justice to the scale of the place - but as ever, the small things are the most engaging anyway :-)

We'd missed the bluebells by about oh, eight or nine days, I'd say - and the place is positively crawling with them, it has to be a really spectacular sight if you catch it at its peak, but the bracken was just starting to unroll.

The path eventually gets down to the bottom of the Glen, and the Burn (the Burn of Cares - the one on the other side is the Burn of Sorrows. Let no-one say us Scots don't take Nature seriously LOL) is really very pretty.

And it looks very pretty and tame now, when it's low - but judging from this next pic, it can be quite ferocious when it's on its day!

This tree was largely a splintered ruin lying just above the water line, and by no means an insubstantial twig!

The Glen takes you up to Castle Campbell, which is pretty imposing:

It's half ruined and half habitable - the central keep is in quite a reasonable state of repair - but it has some lovely, quiet little corners too.

And the views out over the Carse are quite outstanding.

One thing for sure, no one was going to sneak up on you if you lived here *g*.

But again, the small things were wonderful too

And now we come to my personal highlight of the trip :-) Just outside the castle walls, there is a tree. A sycamore tree. A grandaddy of a sycamore tree. A tree with attitude. A tree, you might say, with balls.