One picture is worth an extended caption at least
by - 12:50 on 07 April 2008
Inspired by a recent Tracking Tourism blog at blog.highlandbusinessresearch.com/2008/04/01/once-more-with-feeling/ on how you convey the feel of a place, here are some pictures. Sometimes it isn’t the ones that would ever make it into a conventional tourism brochure that say most about a place.
Nobody could say it was a calendar shot but for me this view sums up the lonely, bare uplands of the Grampians. Just a rolling plateau, crossed by walkers’ paths and ancient rights of way. It’s from the summit of Cairn Bannoch, south east of Braemar. The path linking this hill to Broad Cairn (the high point on the left) can be seen faintly on the right. The head of Glen Clova can just be made out in the very centre. It’s late afternoon in September, the wind has turned chill and it’s time to leave these wide spaces to a couple of patrolling ravens…..a thousand Scottish hillwalkers will know what I mean…..
A sense of space. John Muir Country Park from the Tynninghame end. In less than hour you can be on Princes Street in Scotland’s capital. But would you really want to be?
It’s early spring. In fact, it’s so early, so we should stop pretending and just call it winter. This pic looks north-west from the ‘Gleneagles Gap’ where the Ochil Hills allow one road through from the Forth Valley. In this view, the famous Gleneagles Hotel is dead centre, a thin line in the dark woodlands. But isn’t it obvious where the real Highlands start, a little beyond? There’s plenty of snow still on Ben Chonzie, a white dome on the left, with Glen Turret opening beside it, below which is Glenturret Distillery above the little town of Crieff….enough, enough, this picture was supposed to speak for itself…..
Not a tree in sight. Just a Moray Firth coast seatown sheltering from the wind. There’s a golf course below the cliffs. The clubhouse is the white building on the left, by the shore and left of the sea-stack. This is Cullen. The houses on the horizon are part of Portknockie, the next community to the west.
Inverie, by the shore, is reached by boat from Mallaig, on Scotland’s western seaboard. What you see is what you get. In a nice way.
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