For all the photos I share from this walk in beautiful light – this post from the start of this year springs to mind – there are also plenty of walks that look like this: grey, sullen, damp, dreich. And it’s easy to look at photos like these and feel that this place is a bit depressing. The fallen woodland of John Muir Country Park looks heavy in this light, in this weather. It feels heavy. And perhaps it begs the question, why share these images?
Just a few photos, as I was mostly taking videos on this walk on Sunday, plus it was so, so cold with the wind chill, my frozen hands had had enough after those videos. But I couldn’t resist sharing these skyscapes.
The transition from the long days of summer to the abbreviated days of autumn (and winter) is always a tough one, right? I miss our evening walks more than I can explain. They were the grounding part of my day, and also the uplifting part. Our time to get outside, to drive down the coast and walk below big skies. To watch the lads run and sniff. To exhale out the day and those tight hours spent at a desk. To let our eyes soak in wide vistas after too many hours at a screen.
Indeed, it’s been a minute. Not wanting to sound like a broken record writing, ‘I can’t believe it’s been so long since my last post…’ but, well, I can’t. But it’s been a busy (and good) few months. I’ve started a new freelance gig – very part time, but, like anything new, I’ve spent a lot of time on it and have been really enjoying it. And given that the new gig is in social media (with a focus on Instagram), my brain has been too overloaded with words (and images) to be here too.
But I’ve missed sitting down and writing. Just writing. Not for anyone else, not for a deadline; just for the pleasure of it. So it’s time to get back here.
Do you have certain scenes that you never get tired of photographing? I have a few, the view over Hedderwick Sands (at John Muir Country Park, as in my previous post) being the most obvious, but also every view of Fidra. I started sharing Fidra photos using the tag #TheFidraSeries earlier this year on Instagram, but have many, many more shots – photos I always mean to post but then pause, wondering if people might be bored of the same vista.
But to me this view is never quite the same. The shifting tides, the changing seasons and light – it always feels different. It’s a place that I’ll keep returning to again and again.
I could smell the scorched earth and wood before I saw it. We were walking at John Muir Country Park a few weekends back, on a warm Sunday, and we’d decided to take the reverse route to our usual loop, walking along the side of the woodland that faces onto the salt marshes. I’d paused to take a video of a view through the trees on the edge of the woodland as the sunlight was catching the grasses in the breeze, and as I moved closer I thought, what is that smell? I knew what it was, but why… why could I smell burning?
Hello and welcome to Copperline. My name is Fiona Reid and this is my blog about coastal living in Scotland.