Scotland Scenery and Fungi.

 With Matt now having successfully settled well near Inverness with Emily, I expect my visits to Scotland will become more frequent. Both Lisa and myself do enjoy our trips up there anyway, so Matt and Emily being there just gives us a great excuse to head up there!!

This time we had just under 2 weeks, with 8 days based in two locations near where Matt and Emily live. We had booked the trip before they had moved into their lovely home, but fortunately both of the properties we had booked, for 4 days in each, were both within 20 minutes of them. Our trip also coincided with Matt's birthday, so the Eade tradition of celebrating with a curry was possible!!

The scenery in the area was absolutely amazing with all the autumn colours. However, the wildlife was, in the early part of the trip a little disappointing. This was certainly partly due to the weather, as well as Lisa that had a bit of a bad back in the early part of the trip. Fortunately, this would improve in time for our mountain top visits near the end of the trip.

Our first property was looking across the Aigas valley, where each morning we were treated with a light mist covering the autumn coloured trees on the opposite side of the valley.

Mist covering the opposite woodland.

We were also very close to Glen Affric, and we visited this area several times during the eight days of being in the area. Our first sighting here was a lovely Dipper on the river. We assumed as we saw it straight away, that there must be good numbers here and we spent quite a bit of time on each visit hoping to see more. However, we failed to see any more dippers here, however, on our final morning in Scotland further south, our final wildlfie sighting of note was good views of at least three further dipper. Our visit to the Highlands coincided with the first snow of the winter on the mountain tops. This we really enjoyed seeing and photographing on the visits to Glen Affric.

Glen Affric.

Mass of Silver Birch.

Autumn Colours at Glen Affric.

Glen Affric.

The first snow on the mountain tops.

The mountain tops near Glen Affric.

On one of the days, instead of climbing high up a mountain, we took a more leisurely kind of day looking at Loch Ness. This was partly to make it easier for Lisa to improve her back. As it happened, we still walked several miles that day, but without so much of the heavier camera equipment. Several good viewpoints were seen, but at least we didn't have too much staggering up steep hillsides to do the sightseeing..

Lisa somewhere near Loch Ness.

Most of the scenery shots were taken on our mobiles, as we don't have wide angle lenses, but I still haven't sorted them yet, so all of the photos here were with the 100-400mm zoom. 

On our final morning in Scotland, we had moved further south, to be near Glen Shee. After two long days on top of Glen Shee, we had a morning along the river valley, before the long drive south for a one night stop over near Martin Mere. On the morning on the river valley we had those great views of the dippers. A fabulous finale to our Scotland trip. More of this on another post. However, I was also taken by the views along the valley with some beautiful shaped trees with the mountains behind. I couldn't resist taking a few shots of this.

Autumn around Glen Shee.

As well as the beautiful autumnal colours of the trees, we also saw some nice fungi. with yellow/orange being the popular colour!! The Yellow Stagshorn were particularly numerous, and lovely to see, as was some Orange Peel Fungus.

Yellow Stagshorn.

Orange Peel Fungus.

I could have taken many photos of all the fungi, but I did stay with just the more unusual or colourful ones, however, this Hoof Fungus was quite impressive on a Birch tree.

Hoof Fungus.

Some of the wildlife memorable moments will follow on the next couple of posts.