As a young man, I used to go camping around Scotland with my friend, Bill. We used to travel around the perimeter of Scotland in a clockwise direction, beginning in Glasgow, and then northwards to the top left hand corner of Scotland at Cape Wrath. After that we headed eastwards for John O’Groats and then returned home southwards along the east coast to Edinburgh and England.
I used to take slides with my trusty Voigtländer camera and was then able to bore people silly on wet Tuesday evenings. I recently found all my slides, packed away in a very large box in the attic, but unfortunately, there were a good few which I could not identify. When I got round to doing it, one or two of the slides also suffered during the conversion process into digital images, usually acquiring either an overall blue or purple cast, or, on other occasions, with the image being much darker than it had originally been. Even so. many of these fifty year old slides had a certain value of their own.
These particular ones show the north east of Scotland. This is an area which tends to lack particularly high mountains. Instead, the entire, rather flattish landscape rests on seacliffs of sandstone, but a sandstone which is so compressed that in days of yore it was used for paving slabs. This slide shows what occasionally happens when a bit of the cliff breaks off and forms a column of rock called a “stack”……
This shows you the sharply layered sandstone at the top of the cliff. The paving slabs come almost ready packed! At some places near Scrabster, the slabs are just two wide and there is a 300-400 foot drop either side. An excellent place to test your courage, or alternatively, to cure your constipation……..
Just south of John O’Groats are Duncansby Stacks which are extremely spectacular. This picture, though, shows the dangers of slides, which frequently tend to produce a second rate image of an outstanding natural scene, much more often than modern cameras do…..
Overall, mountains in this region are few and far between. They stand on the familiar landscape of thousands and thousands of tiny pools called “lochans”, where the famous Scottish “midges” breed in their billions. And they bite. Again and again and again……
On one occasion, I counted more than fifty bites on each hand, although this was on the west coast, near RSPB Handa. Anyway, here is a typical scene in the very far north…..
These mountains, with the exception perhaps of the two named after the famous racehorses, Foinaven and Arkle, are not particularly famous, and it is the overall look of the countryside which is striking rather than how spectacular the mountains are.
Here’s the reason that Foinaven became famous, in the 1967 Grand National, held at Aintree in Liverpool…….
Here’s another sea stack, around 300-400 feet high, which looks as if it is still joined to the main cliff………
This stretch of cliff is not particularly striking unless you recognise, perhaps, how similar it is to “Hell’s Mouth” in Cornwall……
This steep sided passageway into the cliff is near Duncansby Head stacks. I’m pretty sure that it is called a “geo” . This one is just over 400 feet deep with a width considerably less than that……
This is taken in the same immediate area and helps provide nesting places for thousands and thousands of nesting seabirds when the season is right…………….
And here is a much better shot of the Duncansby Stacks……..
We went down to the bottom of the cliffs and then went a walk along the rocky shore. When we noticed that the tide was coming in, it was only then that I remembered that the tides here, between mainland Scotland and the Orkney Islands, are among the fastest in the world, along with Newfoundland in Canada. I won’t ever forget that rather frightened scramble we carried out, from rock to rock, and finally to the path back up the cliff to safety.
John Knifton 