The online presence of Tim Collier. Photographer, course leader, lecturer and blogger.
‘I’ll just leave it for you to see’ were Mike’s words as we were driving through South Shields towards Marsden. He’d mentioned nothing about Kittiwakes, a lift or a pub and as we drove into the car-park none of this trio were evident, but he’d said something about a grotto?
The scheduled August walk had to be cancelled due, would you believe, to bad weather! So a rather quickly arranged date was agreed – we needed and still need to  compile enough images that place the walks into a context and time is running out.
The main reason for visiting Northumberland was to see my brother’s exhibition, The Resilience of the Wild, at the Customs House in South Shields.
A trip up to  RSPB Dinas, and a new CCW reserve for me yesterday, proved very productive with regards to the expected species, although the woods did seem a little quiet for this time of year than I remember from previous seasons. I’m wondering if this has anything to do with the lateness of spring in general?
A run up to Dinas, always a favourite haunt, and a good walk around the ‘rock’ past Twm Sion Cati’s cave in still very cold conditions produced some really fine icicles and ice sculptures. It was difficult to get a sense of the beauty through photographs and I felt dissatisfied when I left them, never an easy thing to do, and this disappointment was confirmed when I downloaded the images.
A few more images in a way that I’ve been working lately. I’m putting them into a warm toned  black and white and again looking a the wider aspect of the birds in relationship to their habitat.
The relationship between the cliff top and the sea has always fascinated me. The space that divides the two is somewhere we rarely venture. I’m not a rock climber and even then you’re still grounded, all be it to a near vertical incline.
A day late we headed south and the weather didn’t let us down – it rained! By now we were wanting it to, better to be able to say we had seventeen days with rain, heavy at that, on every single one of them.
We woke to rain, nothing unusual about that, but the van wasn’t shaking and it just felt stiller. Looking out to Handa was just too much, we had planned to move back south today but being opposite the island and now with the possibility that today the boat just might run, we had to give it one last shot. We could move down south a little quicker it was a chance we had to take. It had even stopped raining!
We knew that Handa was a ‘no goer’ today but we still went down to Tarbet where the boat leaves from in more hope than anticipation. Met the boatman coming back in his van, “not a chance today, tomorrow not looking good either”
Leaving Ullapool we travelled up to Scourie and another impressive site, one I’d not stayed on before. You couldn’t really get much closer to the sea here and overlooking Handa, which was to be our last hope of visiting a single off shore island on this journey to Scotland.
The ‘mad little road’ was empty and very wet but as we moved out towards Achiltibuie things began to clear and the wind began to get up.
Ardmair was to be our base for the next couple of nights. The last paragraph of my diary entry for our first day sums up what was to be another long but ultimately rewarding day,
…so all in all saw a great sunrise, a magnificent sunset and 16 hours in between which gave very occasional glimpses of the sublime.
Much of my work over the years has been coastal, it’s somewhere were so much is going on; so many processes and changes, it’s continual and in constant flux and has the capacity to take you into a different space and time.
The hour and a half Brendan and I spent on the beach with the tide pushing us back towards the cliffs took me back to my work at Druidston in Pembrokeshire (more posts to follow).
I’ve always been an avid collector of books and despite now owning a Kindle (they do have some advantages), I’ll keep collecting. You commune with books, they become part of you and immersion within them is an experience that is at times intensely personal.
We’d had one of those extreme moments within the landscape, when something transcendental occurs.
There’s always a highlight to a trip like this and we were about to experience it here. Very heavy pulsing showers had accompanied us up from Kinlochewe and continued into the late afternoon when we arrived at Firemore.
….and so north again, past Slioch and Loch Maree and up toward Gairloch and Poolewe before heading out along the west side of Loch Ewe.
