Tags
Aigas House, Aigas Quarry, bog bean, bog cotton, common frog, four spotted chaser, Glen Affric, Glen Cannich, Glen Strathfarrar, golden retriever, Lord Tweedmouth, oystercatcher, Plodda Falls, red deer, sandpiper, spotted heath orchid, stonechat
Tuesday dawned sunny and bright, and so it continued until mid-morning. (But that was it for the week.) Today was spent going up and down Glen Cannich and Glen Affric.

Four spotted chaser dragonfly

Bog bean

Bog cotton

Spotted heath orchid
The sun abandoned us at this point.

Common sandpiper
We saw enormous numbers of red deer today, sometimes in huge herds.

Stonechat

Oystercatcher
Lunch was spent in a howling and rainy gale, (and in my case inside our vehicle!) so I couldn’t get any decent shots of the dam where we had it. Fortunately the wind and rain dropped at about the time we were to set off again. On the way to Plodda Falls we saw this curiosity, a tribute to the man who ‘invented’ the golden retriever.
The Falls were not for those with vertigo!

Just to be clear, we are looking down from the platform at this point

Then we walked about halfway down, and I took this…

… and this.

But I wanted to take the lot, so I set my camera to panoramic. But it will only do vertical or horizontal, so I had to twist my head and take a skewed vertical picture, if you see what I mean.
On the way back to Aigas House, we called in on Aigas Quarry, hoping to see a peregrine falcon’s nest. We didn’t, but I was able to enjoy the geology and some more wild flowers. The stone is micaceous schist, and was used for building one of the many hydro-electricity dams along the glen. (Did you know that a glen is a valley formed by river action and a strath is a valley formed by glacier action? I didn’t either. Glen Strathfarrar clearly has a problem with its identity!)
Someone came across this tiny frog, barely an inch (2.5 cm) long.
(It will be a couple of days or so before the remaining two posts in this series appear.)