False Figures

I picked up my new glasses yesterday and wore them this morning from first waking up. Every blade of glass was crystal clear during Tim's walk, and I saw two white tails bouncing up and down as deer escaped through the bracken and trees. Only saw their tails, but I was pleased, because deer bones have been found in the last couple of weeks. A hind leg has made the rounds of the field as different dogs found it and trophy-carried it around for a while. Another dog-walker tells me he's seen a couple of heads in a different part of the wood. Coupled with the tyre tracks across the grass I've seen  recently, it looks very much as if poachers have been at work. I was relieved to know that there are still some of the wary creatures around.

Came back and checked my blog stats and was truly amazed to find that today's total was less than yesterday's total. Very odd. I can only assume I misread Friday's total, so perhaps it's just as well I've got new glasses!

On the other hand, it may be Blogger that is at fault. Out with Tim yesterday, I spotted the rabbit (see pic)  and Tim, who was a good deal closer to it, did not. He loped off in the opposite direction without ever sensing it while I took a couple of pictures. Just shows the value of sitting still, saying nothing and minding your own business!

A day in York

Yesterday did not start well. Hair took forever to dry and did not style easily. Sometimes it just falls into place, others, it goes everywhere but where I want it to go.  Then strap broke, so had to select another garment. On the road to York,we saw signs announcing certain A1 junctions had been closed. This provoked much comment in the car about which junctions had been mentioned, where they were and if it would affect us.
End result - we found ourselves involved in a 3-lane halt-and-crawl for at least an hour and half, thus extending our journey time  to twice what it ought to have been. To add insult to injury, when we finally did arrive, York was freezing. A vicious wind slapped through every open space, and it is lucky we were to be able to scamper into the narrow, twisty, enclosed streets of the old city which kept the wind out. Fenwicks cafe was a nice warm haven as we wern't prepared to stand in the queue for Betty's tea rooms, though Penny would have enjoyed their quaintness.
By four o'clock we were ready to leave via the A19 rather than the A1 and lo and behold we inched our way out of York in another nose-to-tail crawl - this time because the ring road traffic blocks anything coming out of the city. The York city council should start thinking about fly-overs and under-passes to ease the traffic flow. It'll be years before I think of going to York again!
I finally got hold of the pics on dh's camera, which has a much better range than mine, and discovered this pic of the deer we saw on our drive north to Inchnadampf. On my camera, they were nothing but tiny brown specks. Click on this one to enlarge it, and see what they really looked like!

On the A835

Strathcanaird

The A835 is a splendid road as it winds and curves through the mountains of Coigach towards Assynt. Strathcanaird is the last habitation for a while, and this is not a road for those who like Little Chefs, craft shops and cafes dotted along the way. It's a road that is a feast for the eyes, and pity the driver who dare not look at the scenery for fear of driving off it!

Stac Pollaidh

Mountains have a character all their own, and I often get the feeling that its not me that's moving, but them. They're not high, as mountains go; few of them are Munroes, over 3,000 feet. But they stand isolated and humped and jagged in the landscape and look as mountains ought to look. Take Stac Pollaidh for instance. Not quite 2,000 feet, if memory serves, but it stands above Loch Lugainn like a cone with a ruffled top. From the summit you can look out, as I once did, over a vista of lochs and bays and out to the sea shining silver in the sun which isn't that far away in this picture. Imagine it, out beyond Stac Pollaidh.
If we'd driven just a hundred yards further, the road would have climbed that little bit more and the picture would have included the loch. 

Cul beg and Cul Mor

It is a road full of surprises. There are footpaths, in the sense of hill tracks, in case I give the wrong impression, that lead to the mountains. Many of the small laybys have a parked car or two and no occupant enjoying the view or sipping thoughtfully from a thermos flask of coffee; they're often to be spotted plodding their way up some impossible seeming hill a couple of miles away. There are deer to look out for, and on this occasion, we found a herd of perhaps thirty, with a magnificent stag  in charge. We watched them with binoculars for a while, but they were too far away for photographs. On my little camera, they'd have been no more than shades of brown among the brown heather.

An aside: as I learned my units of measurement in the good old English way of inches, feet, yards and miles I cannot cope with the metric system. I know a metre equals 39 inches, so if I have to, I grab a calculator, tap in the number of metres, multiply it by 39 to get inches and then divide it by twelve to get feet. Then I can understand, because feet mean something to me.

House of Wine and wildlife

We must have missed the House of Wine in Bergerac on other trips, or else it has opened up this year. We didn't bother going down into the caves or view the art exhibition. The courtyard was more than enough for me, with its wooden gallery on two sides and old, ivy-covered stone and brick walls completing the square. Beneath the gallery a series of posters details the history of wine in the area from Stone Age times, with lots of info on which wines grew where and why. Philistine that I am, I just like drinking it!

Still the rain continues. It's like being at home, except that it's still warmer here most of the time. The clouds are hanging low over the tree tops and the air is thick and heavy - 94% humidity. We may have to go looking for a lavarie soon - we can wash clothes at the mill no problem, but drying them in this weather is an issue.

There is a field surrounded by trees next to the mill, and we've found that deer come down at night and eat the plums off the tree. They regularly trek through in both directions, going down to drink at the river, or just passing through. We've put up our wildlife camera overnight, and caught one picture where the deer certainly saw or heard something from the camera as it took his picture. He stared right at it, and then vanished into the darkness. The camera caught a few other pictures, sometimes a stag, sometimes a doe. We saw a doe while we were eating breakfast on the bolly one morning, and yesterday around sixish, still daylight, I looked up just at the right moment to see a doe and faun sprinting for the cover of the trees.

Characters - another perspective

Vanessa Grant looks at her characters in a different way to McKee. Her Hero/Heroine should have one major motivation driving the story, that she calls the Prime Motivating Force. She believes it should colour their every thought and affect their every move. The PMF should stem from a dramatic event in the character’s past. She recommends a character checklist: Do the characters fit the story spark? Are they alive? Do you care about them? What do they want? Why can’t they have it? Should they have it? What happens when goal meets obstacle? What then? What doesn’t work about the whole thing? When it doesn’t work, throw out the character, spark or setting and begin again!

Look closely at the top picture and I think you'll agree that the deer is perfectly camoflaged against the winter foliage. Had it not been for its white rump, I wouldn't have spotted it. We stared at one another for about a minute, and then dog-walkers appeared from the opposite direction, the deer gracefully turned tail, leapt the fence into the woods and disappeared.

Deer and Black Moments

I wrote here on 19th February that I was almost up to the Black Moment in my wip HD. Here I am, 15 days later, and still at the same point! What are my excuses? I have gone through the story again from page one because I wanted to check and change a small point to make the end of the story better. Also, having 3-day breaks kind of disrupts the flow and I wanted to make sure I was clear before I moved on. So, I am at that point NOW, so no more excuses. Once I have finished this, it's off to the wip.

The picture above captures a magical moment on the road from Loch Lugainn to the A835. Dh was driving, which freed me up to gaze out at the scenery and I saw a stag 100 yards away up the hillside. We stopped immediately, I got out the camera and wound down the window. The stags were lying about in the heather, and one by one got to their feet - six of them! They are so wary. In spite of the fact that we were so far away, by the time I had taken two or three shots they were all on their feet, shaking rain out of their coats and watching us suspiciously. Then one shot off up the hillside and the rest followed. My last picture is of an empty hillside with one rump disappearing behind a convenient rock!

I felt guilty for disturbing them. Driving down the A835 to Ullapool, I noticed more antlers sticking up above the skyline - another group. Now I wonder if they drifted down to the lower levels because they sensed the snow coming, for next day we drove south through horrendous rain and wind with visibility down to about ten feet on the busy A9. We saw flooded land around Aviemore and the Tay was very high. We got home to a weather report that promised snow over much of the Highlands, including Ullapool and by Saturday, the snow had arrived.

Perhaps those deer have a built in early warning system. I'm so glad we saw them.