After lifting of the Lockdown in Scotland on the 26th April 2021 our first trip was a rather long one – Cairngorns, Uist, Harris & Lewis and back to Gairloch.

This series of blogs tries to keep the images and memories alive

The start was a rather frosty one – the Cairgorns were still hibernating after a long and cold winter and with around 2°C everything is quite suspended. Anyhow the scenery is stunning and wild

The old pine plantations make walking rather a different experience and it looks more like „kingdom of the ferns“ than anything else.

After this bleaker chapter we headed towards Oban as our ferry routing had been changed from Mallaig to there for our outward trip to Lochboisdale (South Uist).

On the way is our most loved lighthouse in the channel between Mull and Oban which is like an old friend – always looking forward to meet!

That is the downside of the dry weather (which had been all the time before) – heather and moor is burning easily. Looks rather scary especially as you can’t do a lot to stop it (not much of fire brigades out there…)

Uist is (compared to the rest of Scotland) rather flat but nice and gentle. Quite some folks still speak Gaelic out there in the Western Isles, but it is diminishing in the younger generation and thus mostly used in Church (which unfortunately tends to be extremely old-fashioned and conservative for the most part) and sometimes in private conversations among older people.

Anyhow the most impressive feature of all the islands there are the beaches (always on the west coast – the east cost is rocky)

As I said – the beaches are very special

Contemporary art

I love these brackets at the end of the bay

Doing some inland walking (where there is not very much in terms of pre-defined paths, so mostly it’s bogging along…)

Very interesting way to habe the graveyard – all along the slope of the hill