This was a saying my mother would often say to me when I had done something in a hurray and mucked it up. Well it was never truer than with the last blog. I thought “well nothing else is on the cards for this month, so I might as well publish now, four days early” and what happened quite a bit as it happens, so I will start August blog of at the end of July. Also from the last blog, I should have checked my facts re if any of the village flower displays had ever been stolen, apparently one of those half barrels, complete, was stolen back in two thousand and twenty, never to be found.
29th.
My hawkeyed wife spotted this Hare about fifty yards from the house tucked down in the thistles, thought it was amusing that it gave me two bookend shots , asking “which is my good side?”.
30th
It is very unusual to hear aircraft low around us on a Sunday morning, unless it is the local Laird up in one of his planes that I have shown you before. But this morning the distinct sound of a helicopter ( a Coastguard one) flying low down the glen. It hovered a bit over the village, but then I thought it had gone along the same route as the A9 heading towards Pitlochry. In fact it had landed near the village and it wasn’t until an hour later I heard it start up again. Rushed to a spot that looks down on the village and after some delay it took off as seen in the first shot. We presumed that it had picked up a casualty and was heading of to the Trauma Centre in Dundee, but no, it headed to the top of the hill known as Tulloch Hill and landed (as in shots two and three) . Only then (last shot) did it head towards Dundee. Not sure at present what happened but will update you when I know. (Update. It was a training exercise)
2nd.
About three years ago the fences on the edge of the field was renewed and at first I couldn’t understand why they put a double fence in and then a few weeks later the estate planted a hedge. The gap in the hedge stopped looking bare the following summer, but did seem very slow growing. This year I suddenly noticed that it is thriving and a good variety of bushes/shrubs growing in it, Birch, Rowan& Hawthorn at least.
Here you can see the full length of it, looks good and healthy.
Walked down to our River Fender as they have just extracted some of the gravel from the spot in the shot above, following the section in a previous blog about the gold prospectors I wondered if it might be worth doing some panning?
The two plants above were growing along side the river, the purple one I recognise as Knapweed but the other one I had to put on my photographic forum to ask what it was as I thought it was just a different type of Hogweed. The general feeling is it is wild Angelica, shall have to go and smell it to see.
Very much a snatch shot, wrong lens etc. but I have never seen a spider with a fluorescent yellow body and the brown legs. No idea what it is may try and find it on a site on the net. P.S. Looked it up could be the Cucumber Green Spider.
10th.
We have a drystone wall along the front of our house which is our border from our property to the Atholl Estates field in front of us and unfortunately part of that wall has blown and was in danger of collapsing. Today I had a company called Drystone Walling Perthshire come and have a look, Martin the boss gave me a price and as he had one of his workers (Nathan) with him he offered to start it right away as they had finished the previous job early. Below is the story of the reconstruction.
This was the state of the wall before work commenced, a three metre long by one and a half metre high section of wall needed rebuilding.
End of the half day wall demolished.
By the end of day two the wall was completed, nothing but praise for the standard of hard work and craftmanship shown by Nathan. Such skill I just have to keep going down and admiring it, makes the rest of the wall look shabby and most important for us was the way the company just were so efficient, cannot recommend them high enough. To top it all they were a very reasonable price.
18th.
What do I do when I wakeup early and cannot get back to sleep? Sneak out of bed, get dressed and go for a walk with my camera of course. So that is what happened this morning, could see the mist was all about (more like an Autumn morning than the middle of August) so started to take a few shots the above two were the best of the shots.
Come the evening and I look out the window and a most unusual sunset, so many colours from one view point, so again picked up the camera and took a few shots through the glass window (to lazy to go out) and below were the shots to illustrate what I saw.
