The online presence of Tim Collier. Photographer, course leader, lecturer and blogger.
Islay’s about the perfect destination in winter if you love both geese and a good malt. For such a small island it has a wealth of fine distilleries and they are wonderfully located. Eight distilleries in such a compact area all responding to the natural characteristics of the island.
Back on Islay and some of the landscapes. We were fortunate in having some really fine light and looking at the weather that’s around now we definitely hit a little purple patch.
Following on from the previous post this set once again aims to give a sense of the broader context in which the geese are experienced.
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.
After lunching at Reiff we headed south to Achitibuie to look back towards Ardmair and past by the best school bus stop I’ve ever seen. Just imagine standing there waiting for the day to begin!
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.
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.
The weather deteriorated today, if that was possible and the showers got heavier and the wind increased.
The afternoon of our first day around Kinlochewe saw us move up to Gairloch and to Red Point overlooking the islands of Raasay and North Rona.
We had three nights at Kinlochewe and this diary extract from our first day there gives some sense of our mounting frustration with the weather.
This set of images takes us from Sheil Bridge to Kinlochewe. We briefly touched Skye on this journey crossing on the Kylerhea ferry. Again we had some appalling weather but it cleared for an hour at the very end of the day and Beinn Eighe slowly showed itself.
