In my early twenties. in the 1970s, some fifty years ago now, I used to go camping around Scotland with my friend, Bill. We used to travel around the perimeter of Scotland in a clockwise fashion, with a route through Glasgow, then up to the north-west corner of Scotland at Cape Wrath, then to the north-east corner at John O’Groats and then home southwards along the east coast to Edinburgh and England. In those days we used to camp where we could find a reasonable place to do so…..”wild camping”, it used to be called. As long as we left no mess, the landowners didn’t seem to bother. I used to take slides with my trusty Voigtländer and was then able to bore people rigid with my slide show “The Geology of the Western Highlands”.
I found all my slides recently, in a very large box in the attic, but unfortunately, there were a good few which I could not identify. One or two of them had also suffered during their conversion into digital images, usually with either an overall blue or purple cast being added to the image, or, on other occasions, with the image being much darker than it had originally been.
This 45 year old slide shows a long forgotten glen in the Highlands. It is probably a little darker as a digital image after going through the conversion process from the original slide…..
One of the most famous places in Western Scotland is the Isle of Skye. It has two very famous ranges of mountains. This hill here is one of the Red Cuillins, based on sandstone and not very difficult or dangerous to climb. According to legend, a Viking princesss is buried at the summit. Here is my best photograph of this brightly coloured mountain. Sadly, many of my world class photographs of its summit were minced up by the scanner in its efforts to change them from greeny-purple to red………
The next slide is of a very famous view on the Isle of Skye, namely not the Red Cuillins, but the Black Cuillins, long reputed as being the only mountain walk in Britain which cannot be completed without the use of climbing equipment.
In front of us are the ruins of an old farmer’s house, probably a victim of the Highland Clearances. Alternatively, they may be the ruins of the school house in the village, which was called “Elgol”……
These ruins here may be of a cottage. Sorry about the Purple Haze………
Moving backwards slightly reveals the remains of a cliff, now eroded down to just forty or fifty feet in height…….
I have always loved to watch clouds drift along the face of a mountain. This is one of the Cuillins in the previous picture, with heavy mist swirling in one of the corries visible in the slides above. A “corrie” can also be called a “cirque” or a “cwm“.
At a different site is the so-called “Old Man of Storr” which is 160 feet tall, “the same height as eleven double decker buses stacked on each other!” Other pinnacles surround it, and I well remember how bizarre they all were, as we climbed up to them through thick fog…..
The western side of the Isle of Skye has some enormous sea cliffs. I think that this slide may have been taken close to the so-called “Kilt Rock” where the different patterns made by the various different rocks give the impression that the cliffs are made of tartan.
I couldn’t resist. though, a few more pictures of the Cuillins. The beach they are taken from is the same one we have seen before, called “Elgol”. These three slides were all taken at the end of a rainy, relatively dark day……
In this rather dark slide the ruined house and the little cliff both make a special guest appearance……as does a plank, washed off the deck of a tramp steamer in the Caribbean Sea, perhaps……..
Last but not least, some blue sky peeks under the dark clouds of the late morning……
This last slide is a good example of one of the great problems of using this type of film rather than the type that will eventually produce a wallet of some 36 colour photographs. Slides always seem to be dark, often in light conditions which ought to produce a superior end product.