Leaving ‘Auld Reekie’

My chief complaint about Edinburgh is there are too many distractions. The festivals don’t stop after August — a steady stream of them follows soon after The Fringe, involving storytelling, fiddling, folk music, dance and heaven only knows what I missed. There are always must-see exhibitions, compelling lectures, and art films to watch in vintage cinemas. There’s a difficult choice of cosy pubs where fiddlers are fiddling; lots of ceilidhs, several cycle tracks to Victorian swimming pools, yoga workshops, beginners’ courses in stepdance, song, whistles and the pipes. More problematically there are too many shop windows displaying must-have shoes for sale. Then the Christmas lights come on, soon after that it’s Hogmanay, and all these distractions mean the hills and seashore become forgotten. It’s no use to me to live half an hour’s drive from a track or the beach because I just don’t reach them often enough. So next week I’m travelling through great big hills to miles of seashore eight hour’s drive and a ferry ride away. It’ll be too far to come back for shoes. And what’ll it matter, I’ll be in Orkney!

‘Dreaming Spires’ sculpture

My favourite place for meeting in central Edinburgh is under the bellies of two larger-than-life giraffes on Leith Walk. The sculptures are brilliantly shaped from rusty car and motorcycle parts, and the words of a poet form a circle round them in the paving stones:

Giraffes! — a people who live between earth and skies Each in his own religious steeple Keeping a lighthouse with his eyes

And it’s funny that I’ve come to like this spot so much, as it was only when I Googled the poet, Roy Campbell, that I discovered he was South African. I should’ve known that, having been an English student in Cape Town, but it was fun finding out this way.

Poem by Roy Campbell (1946)

Sculpture by Helen Denerley (2005)

August in Edinburgh

All the way through August I made mental notes to record highlights of the Edinburgh Festival, but then the fireworks finale shattered my train of thought and all I could think of was the spectacular sky display on the last night of the festival. It was the closest I’ve been to seeing the Northern Lights, which the Scots aptly call ‘The Merry Dancers’, because on this night The Merry Dancers took the form of fireworks moving in time to Dvorak's Slavonic and Brahms' Hungarian dances. The musical compositions were performed live in Princes Street gardens by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and broadcast all the way down Princes Street itself, where hundreds of thousands of us stood with eyes fixed on Edinburgh Castle while the synchronised coloured rockets and sparkling whirls made light confetti of the sky.

Now that those sparks have settled I remember the highlights of the festival month when street performers, from mime artists and monocyclists to puppets on strings, turned the Royal Mile into an open-air theatre daily, despite it being the wettest August since records began. Music happened in funky venues like the 1930s cabaret-style Spiegeltents, where old-timey string band The Wilders played vintage honky-tonk music like in Oh Brother, Where Art Though? I got lucky on a ticket to see Gaelic rock stars Runrig, and my favourite Julie Fowlis, playing at Edinburgh Castle just moments before the show began, and was ushered into the Queen’s Hall for a Salsa Celtica concert by a good-natured member of the band. It was great fun knowing that authors like Ian Rankin, Salmon Rushdie and Alexander McCall Smith were walking about the Book Festival and we heard Margaret Atwood speak on the 40th anniversary of the Man Booker Prize, avoiding arbitrary questions from the audience with replies I chuckle about still. There were poets reading love poems, published novelists reading first chapters of unpublished novels, performances in phone boxes. It was thrilling to see Matthew Bourne’s racy ‘Dorian Gray’ on the opening night of the world premiere, from the highest and cheapest seats in Kings Theatre. But I needed big binoculars for the finer details. There was always music in the streets and always people handing out flyers for yet another performance I wouldn’t get to see. I had great friends visiting on two weekends of the four and from wherever we stood we were never more than five minutes from a show, a street performance, a gallery, a row of alluring shops or probably someone famous. It wasn’t possible to see a thousandth of what the Festival had to offer because too much was happening all at once, but for all of August I did see Edinburgh city Dressing Up and Going to Town.

Goodbye Rankeillor Street

In July I rented a room in a flat in the student centre of Edinburgh. Around the corner was a wine shop that was convenient for some, and two doors further along was a fish shop that was smelly for all. It was close to the Queen’s Hall and the place to go ceilidh dancing, and there was a grand view of the Salisbury Crags, where climbers hung on the long summer evenings. But the kitchen was always a mess and one flat-mate moved out with the telephone. Another was involved in a late-night inebriation scene for which you’ll need a password to read more. We also had a 24-hour panic when a workman in the flat below mistakenly turned off our water supply. But if there hadn’t been a water-cut, I wouldn’t have wandered down to Warrender Baths, a beautifully restored Victorian swimming pool from the 1800s with old-fashioned, arched changing booths, period clocks, and a rounded glass roof that I could see the evening sky through while I swam. When the doors closed at ten o’ clock I walked along to the ringing of bells from a Marchmont church, pausing with wide eyes as a fox dashed across Mansion House Road. It was a fair exchange for no water in the Rankeillor Street flat, and now that I’ve left it I don’t mind its bothers a bit.

Songs from a castle

This week I took a minimum-wage temp job in a part of Edinburgh best known for its inhabitants on heroin. The recruitment agent said, ‘Wear jeans and no jewellery,’ and ‘Don’t worry, it’s not like Jo’ burg’! I rode there on a pleasant cycle track at least, but to brighten a day of data capture and paper shredding, I walked in the late afternoon towards the Old Town, with its cobbles and its castle, to find thousands of others doing the same. They were on their way, and so it seemed was I, to hear Leonard Cohen live in an open-air concert at Edinburgh Castle. The singer-songwriting poet is now 74 and, after a 15-year absence from the stage, tickets for his world tour concerts are like gold. Those on the minimum wage, or who hadn’t secured a £150 (R2 500) ticket, stood near North Castle Wynd looking up at the turrets and hearing ‘Suzanne’ and ‘Halleluja’ coming down on the wind. When I walked home through the streets of the Old Town I could still hear his voice drifting along South Castle Wynd, through Grassmarket and into Cowheadgate before fading into Candlemaker Row to the tune of ‘So Long Marianne’.

Hang on for the Outer Hebrides

The Outer Hebrides must wait, not to be visited, but to appear on the blog. Since returning from those lonely western isles I’ve been consumed by Edinburgh and the practicalities of normal life and finding work. It’s not all been shock and reality. I’ve escaped for a surf at Pease Bay, seen thousands of seabird chicks on the Isle of May, been swimming in Victorian baths and steaming in Portobello’s Turkish hammam, been mountain-biking in Musselburgh and I’ve spent an evening at a ceilidh dance being swung and spun into really quite blissfull dizziness. I’ll get to the Outer Hebrides: ‘From the Butt to Barra’ I think I’ll call it.

Orkney to Ullapool in T199 RBS

I’ve been beetling about in a blue car. All in one day I left Orkney by ferry across the Pentland Firth, revisited Thurso (still no waves) and beautiful Brough Bay (still there) and had a quick walk along a beach called Farr. Driving west across the north coast of Scotland I found the town of Tongue and followed a footpath to its ruined Castle Varrich that sits on a hill looking down. Back on the road, moorland stretched for miles towards Ben Hope and Ben Loyal, with Loch Hope and Loch Loyal between. There wasn’t a building in sight and the road was narrow, passing yet another a loch where, be warned, you sink into peat if you try to swim. I wanted to linger at Sangobeg Beach, but had puffins to find before dark at Durness. I asked for directions to their cliff-side burrows, but the directions weren’t right, or I didn’t listen, and instead of puffins in burrows I found sheep in sand-dunes. At 10 pm and growing dark I gave up on puffins and settled for sheep, but to my delight, one of them was darker than usual and even had a broad white stripe running down its face, and wasn’t a sheep at all, but a badger. Then there was another one, which followed the first into a burrow. I couldn’t linger here either, as I had miles to go and promises to keep before morning, so I retraced my steps and drove on further before pitching a tent on a magnificent moor, with white cotton grass flowers all round. By three in the morning it was light again and, wide awake, I carried on driving via Inchnadamph. At long last a sign told me I’d arrived in Ullapool. And what good timing that was, as a bus from Inverness had also just arrived in Ullapool, a bus that had my mum on it!

Auld Lang Syne

I won’t forget the words of the art guard in the Aberdeen Art Gallery. ‘Och lassie, it’ll change yer life’, he beamed, when I told him I was off to Shetland for the Folk Festival. Thinking back to 2005, I’m not sure what he meant. Did he think the festival, or Shetland, would change my life? Or did something in him pick up on my family links to Shetland and Orkney, which I only discovered two years later? Well anyway, I like remembering that the journey I’m on began with a laugh at a comment I thought was fanciful. The Shetland Folk Festival did alter my course. The haunting Celtic tunes playing from fiddles, accordions, whistles, pipes and drums stayed with me so powerfully that three years later I found myself living in Scotland, attending Shetland’s ‘sister’ Orkney Folk Festival, and again following traditional tunes down cobbled streets into pubs, halls, hotels, churches, the magnificent St Magnus Cathedral and the Pickaquoy Centre, where a thousand people, mostly Orcadian, had come to hear The Scottish Fiddle Orchestra. It was one wonderful thing to have the principal piper walk through the audience as he ‘piped in’ the orchestra of more than 80 fiddles, double basses, cellos, accordions, flutes and percussion, and to have the principal conductor, whose own fiddling stems from Orcadian roots, conduct a moving repertoire of reels, slow airs and tone poems of local significance. But for the orchestra to play out, joined by the island’s Kirkwall City Pipe Band and Orkney’s top fiddle-playing children, in a hundred-fiddle-strong performance of Auld Lang Syne, for which the audience instinctively stood, crossed their arms and held hands to sing to the beat of drums, was truly quite another.

Don’t miss the Eynhallow

There’s only one ferry back from Egilsay to Rousay. I repeat, only one ferry. I was anxious about missing it so I got to the pier half an hour early and, as it was blowing a gale, sheltered in the waiting room reading The Little General and the Rousay Crofters. There was lots of time, but I kept checking the clock on my camera, just to be sure. When there was still a whole ten minutes to go, I got up to check the pier. And there – pulling away from it – was the Eynhallow. Well I ran down that pier with everything tumbling from my bag, my arm stretched high, thinking, ‘This–is–a–complete–disaster’. There’s just about nothing on Egilsay apart from a ruined church where my great great great great grandparents got married, wild spring flowers, a corncrake trail without any corncrakes on it yet, and a beautiful white-sand beach from which only the crazy have a quick swim. I ran down that pier. And I next took a breath when the ferry stalled and started coming back. ‘I thought you left at 5pm!’ I gasped. ‘It’s ten past five,’ he said, and right enough, my camera clock was ten minutes slow. The main thing was that the deck was coming down and I would soon be stepping onto the last ferry back to Rousay. The crew and captain invited me for tea in the bridge and, as it turns out, I was the only passenger onboard!

The ring around Rousay

The man I rented the bicycle from was astonished that it took me twelve hours to ride the ring-road around Rousay. ‘It should take no more than two!’ he said. Not if you feel compelled to stop and walk the paths to every hill loch you pass looking for Red-throated divers, visit every Neolithic chambered tomb along the island’s fascinating mile of ancient architecture, search for the land your family farmed in the 1800s, get talking to a man who turns out to be a distant relative and kickstarts the trail of meeting direct relatives in Orkney, realize you’ve forgotten your camera at a 5 000-year-old broch and ride all the way back to fetch it, buy a consolatory ice-cream from the only shop on the island, eat the ice-cream, climb the highest hill, watch a hen-harrier hunting, and have a picnic. ‘That,’ I said, ‘takes a good twelve hours to do.’

The fairest floo-er

Fancy using binoculars to find flowers. The Scottish Primrose is so tiny that its five petals, together, are smaller than my smallest fingernail. Seeing them is an occasion as the species is rare and confined to the north coast of Scotland and Orkney. A lass I met on Papa Westray showed me where they were, on an exposed sea-facing hill a short distance from the sea-cliffs. Once we’d seen one we could see several, though not easily with the naked eye, so we lay on the hill taking turns with my binoculars, exclaiming at the numbers of them hidden in the grass. Then a foreign man with a large hat appeared at our feet. I asked him if he wanted to see the flowers through my binoculars and he declined, saying he was looking for puffins, and puffins only. [Puffins don’t stray far from the sea-cliffs, and during the day they’re fishing.] ‘Don’t think you’ll find them up here,’ I said, ‘so mind the floo-ers’!

Signs of life on Papay

The last Great Auk (a tall puffin-like bird) in Great Britain was shot on the isle of Papa Westray in 1813, but when I arrived by ferry from nearby Westray I felt like the last Great Auk myself. There were Arctic Terns about, but not another of my species in sight. From the pier I walked in the evening sunshine with all my bags for two kilometres, to the Papay hostel. Even though I didn’t see a single human being, I saw evidence of five thousand years of human life: just a hundred metres from the hostel stood The Knap of Howar, which had been occupied by Neolithic farmers around 3500BC and is the longest-standing house in Northern Europe; Holland Farm, which was the home to the lairds of the island for three centuries from the 1700s to the 1900s, stood right next door; through binoculars I saw a water mill last used for milling oats about 100 years ago and, as the hostel door was open, with clean sheets and towels on a nice big bed, I detected the scent of hospitality within my lifetime. But it wasn’t until mid-morning the following day that I met a person, the lass managing the hostel, and asked if I could please spend the night before.

A set of bagpipes and eight surfboards

While kicking my heels in Kirkwall, waiting for a ferry to the isle of Westray, I followed the sound of Amazing Grace to the magnificent St Magnus Cathedral. There, piping out the tune was the surfer I’d met the day before at Skara Brae, a Neolithic village overlooking Orkney’s best surf spot. He and his chocolate-brown dog have been living in a van for five years, and for 15 he’s been busking for an incredible 30 to 110 quid an hour, but often being arrested for the noise. His homely van was undeniably a surfer’s outfit, neatly packed with eight surfboards, one hundred blocks of Mrs Palmers surf wax and framed photos of the classic line-ups he’s surfed. Still, I made no assumptions and asked him if he surfed, then he invited me in for tea. In place of a passenger seat there was a leather armchair facing into the van space, from where he’d watch dvds or entertain an unexpected guest. He told me all about surfing in Orkney, then said he’d join me for a walk along the sea-cliffs, had nothing better to do, was just waiting for waves.

A twilight ride

I was just sitting there in the chips shop below Sandra’s Hostel making use of the wi-fi when Postman Craig came in with his motor-biking gear saying here lassie put this on we’re going for a wee ride and an old man in the chips shop said you should go to Dunnet Head and so we biked over to the mainland’s mostly northerly point passing a village or two and bogs and lochs and broom bright yellow in bloom and when we got to a viewpoint near the lighthouse you could see the cliffs and beaches and the headlands of the northern coastline and Orkney’s Old Man of Hoy and beyond to other lighthouses and sea stacks in the Atlantic and then we saw a footpath along the cliffs and we peered over and saw fulmars gliding and nesting on sheer ledges and guillemots and razorbills too and Craig said hey look at those things and I peered over and those things were puffins PUFFINS they were puffins just sitting there on the tiniest grassy ledge and I couldna believe it cos I waited an hour for the last puffin I saw on the Isle of Staffa in 2005 and I’d seen none on Handa Island a week ago but there in the gloamin were six puffins on their ledge looking up at us perched on our ledge and I didn’t have my camera and I still had my helmet on cos I didn’t expect to see such things and we sat there in the fullness of surprise and when the lighthouses lit up along the headlands and the sky turned pink we biked back past lochs reflecting the pink and a deer appeared from behind the broom and even at 60 miles an hour from the back of the bike I spotted a wading curlew and our hands were as cold as ice when we arrived back at the chips shop.

A postman and a surf at 59° North

I arrived in Thurso expecting to be able to buy what I needed to surf. Thurso East is, after all, one of Great Britain’s most respected surf spots. But instead of surf shops there were surf rats taking part in the international Highland Open professional surf contest. This meant lots of boards, wetsuits, hoods, boots and gloves floating around, and Sandra’s Hostel above the chips shop seemed to be a good place to start catching them. One guy walked into the chips shop at 10 pm, in his wetsuit, having driven seven hours from Edinburgh for a surf. Before I said Hello I said, Fancy selling your board? But he was too cold to talk so we sealed the deal in the morning, at the castle walls near the surf spot. Well, I spent more than I’ve ever spent on his board, but it’s practically new and epoxy 6’3, wide and floaty, good for all kinds of waves, and there were no other boards for sale in town. The best I could do for a wetsuit, hood and gloves, was a size too big. But no boots. So I was forced to surf Thurso East without boots. I surfed it alone too, cos the contest was over and the surfers had flown home to Oz, USA, Brazil. Well, I wasn’t entirely alone. In the hostel I’d met a Scottish postman who’d come to watch the surf contest for his holidays. Since I didn’t have wetsuit boots, he offered to hold my hiking boots and socks for me while I surfed. I could then pull them on the minute I got out the surf. It was a great idea! So there he stood, on the rocks, in the drizzle, holding my boots upside down so as not to get them wet, while I caught waves till my feet got cold. There was no-one else in sight. Just a lassie in the ocean and a postie on the shore.

The birds distract me

While I sit here wondering how to begin recording all that happened last week I’m distracted by the most beautiful thing fluttering about in a Scots pine. It’s a great tit – yellow, blue, black and white all at once – and there it is again! Actually it’s a blue tit, not a great tit, as my RSPB pocket guide to British Birds shows. The pocket guide also says, ‘It’s a very lucky person who sees a golden eagle well at close range.’ Well, I saw a golden eagle very well, at close range, on the Isle of Skye. We were on our way to Kilt Rock, just past the Old Man of Storr, when Tony spotted it flying along a line of tree-tops. It was unmistakably a golden eagle by its size and coloration, and we viewed it perfectly through the bins till it took off with slow, powerful wingbeats before gliding out of sight. I was also lucky to see the lovely lapwing, visiting for the summer near a Celtic graveyard close to where we wild-camped on the sea loch on Skye. The lapwing has such an exquisite crest and coloration that I thought it ought to have a qualifying name like the African lapwings do. But just a plain-named lapwing it was, and fairly common in Scotland. Then there was the redshank, with its bright red legs and red bill fading to black, on a kind of estuary in Scourie where we saw a very bonnie sundown. The oystercatchers are as striking as the African ones are and their call comfortingly familiar. My best sighting of them was on the salmon-pink sand of beautiful Applecross beach. Oh and I hadn’t seen ptarmigan before, high up on a Corbett in Torridon being snowed on without complaint. Then there was Handa Island… where thousands and thousands of fulmars, guillemots and razorbills nest on magnificent sea stacks and cliffs 100 metres high. There were great skuas too and although the puffins hadn’t arrived yet, the eider ducks were there, protected from eiderdown fate. And did I mention the red-breasted mergansers at Lochinver, the ringed plovers at Achnahaird, the curlew and sandpipers near Achiltibuie, the wheatears in summer plumage at Ardveck Castle? I’ll stop. I still haven’t started on last week’s activities.

There are no signs to Camusfearnà

Even though there no signs to the beach where Ring of Bright Water author Gavin Maxwell lived and wrote the classic account of his life with otters, there’s a path you do just seem to find when you want to go there. Maxwell was quite a man. His biographer Douglas Botting described him as an aristocrat, adventurer, naturalist and conservationist, secret agent, shark hunter, racing driver, poet, painter and social renegade; also a most remarkable Scotsman and one of the most popular authors of wildlife books of the 20th century. His house was destroyed in 1968 by fire, which also killed his favourite otter, Edal. A year later Maxwell died too, but a curious atmosphere remains on the beach in his place. He disguised the identity of this pristine piece of coast in Ring of Bright Water by calling it Camusfearnà, yet Sandaig can be found on the map, and that’s where Camusfearnà is. You walk down through woods and then cross a burn by rope-bridge before you’re there, greeted by a memorial stone and a cairn in place of Maxwell’s house. It’s beautiful on this shore of the Sound of Sleat. We swam in the cobalt-blue water – dipping into it seemed the vital thing to do in such a magical place – and I imagined the otters Maxwell had spent his time with. Perhaps not so incidentally, there’s a wonderful otter hide some miles and a short ferry crossing away on the Isle of Skye, at Kylerhea, which also lies on the Sound of Sleat. From there we sat and watched seals and gulls fishing in the high-tide current before being ferried to the quaint little village of Glenelg just a few miles from Camusfearnà. We didn’t see otters at all that day but, as one does with the Ring of Bright Water otters, imagining them is almost enough.

Over the sea to Skye

Good weather forecasts call for spontaneity so, on the spur of the moment, we set off for the Isle of Skye and its Glenbrittle Hostel, which lies at the base of the Black Cuillin mountain range we wanted to climb. The walk from Glenbrittle beach started out easy, but by the time we reached Corrie Lagan the track disappeared into snow and Tony lead on up a steep slope of it. Using ice axes we reached a ridge leading towards Sgurr Mhic Choinnich, which is a wee bit exposed in places. We couldn’t make the summit as there was ice in the Great Stone Shoot, but from the ridge we could see the conspicuous Inaccessible Pinnacle in perfect view, as well as all the other Cuillin peaks and the Inner Hebridean isles of Rhum, Eigg and Canna. Getting to the base of In Pinn was spectacular, with more snow-gully climbing that I’ve got quite used to now. We didn’t climb the pinnacle itself but a guy who we met on the summit of Sgurr Dearg did, in just 10 minutes. We couldn’t decide what to climb the following day, there was so much choice, so we nipped into Portree for a bit of charcoal-coat-and-chartreuse-jacket shopping and sweet chai at Café Arriba, and then settled on the ascent of Blaven, which called for the most exhilarating manouevres yet. I couldn’t see how we could possibly get down from this munro without tracing our steps until Tony kicked steps into a vertical wall of snow beneath us. That brought us to another slope we had to ascend in a similar way before reaching the summit of Blaven. On top we met a bare-legged artist sketching the Cuillin ridge, which we’d seen from the other side the day before. The descent turned out to be straightforward and we chatted all the way down in twilight that the Scots call gloamin. We wild-camped on the shore of a sea loch in view of the peak we’d just climbed, made a fire with drift-wood and only woolly sheep passed us by.

Into the heart of Torridon

Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be climbing mountains in Scotland like I did today. They were just as impressive as the Himalaya and the High Atlas, and there were lochs into the bargain, and nobody around. Tony was my leader as we walked into a corrie with the perfectly still corrie loch Mhic Fhearchair and forbidding peaks all round: Sàil Mhor, Beinn Dearg, Beinn Aillegan, Beinn Eòin, Rhuadh-stac Mór, with Triple Buttress at the head of the loch. All the peaks were covered in snow and we walked up one of them, a munro called Coinneach Mhor on Beinn Eighe, using ice-axes to keep our grip up the steep slope of snow that was actually a waterfall beneath. The sun was burning hot going up, but at the top it snowed soft, hail-like stones like polystyrene balls, which they call nevee. What a thrilling ascent through the snow to the top of my second munro (282 to go!), but I hadn’t anticipated the descent, which was a near vertical slope of snow and scree. Proper concentration on the 75-degree snow traverse became a fast, exhilarating bum-slide and finally a scary skid down the scree slope. That was like being on a conveyer-belt of moving rock, which I was pleased to be a surfer for, but worried that I’d cause an avalanche down on Tony who was below me. Epic and awesome this day was. Seven hours on the trot. I think we’ll bring the Sabbath forward and take a rest day tomorrow.

A white walk up Meall a’ Ghiubhais

I had no idea that a highland cow could be so shaggy. They look like buffalos with the manes of Kalahari lions, and can barely see through their fringes. They also stand defiant in the path of Land Rovers, as Tony and I discovered when we came across them on a single track leading down to beautiful Slaggan Bay. It’s a secret little beach that the Queen and her entourage once boated to for a picnic. We made a quick detour to see it after walking the Mellon Udrigle coastal trail through peat-bogs overlooking coves and bays, Hebridean islands and snow-covered peaks. Yesterday we climbed one of the peaks we could see from the peat-bog – Meall a' Ghiubhais it’s called, and we did it calf-deep in snow. It was spectacular to be up there in view of countless high peaks, lochs below. Actually we didn’t even intend climbing it but from the foothills of Beinn Eighe it seemed so inviting. Walking in snow is fabulous and peaceful somehow as you crunch through the still crispness leaving large footprints. We had no water so we ate the snow.

Tony has climbed all the peaks I could see. He’s a palaeaontologist who I hitched a ride with on the Isle of Mull in 2005. We’ve been writing ever since and it’s fun to be visiting his home on a hill in Gairloch in the north-western Highlands at the end of a long single-track road that winds through high mountains, lochs and the odd Scots pine. His home is full of interesting books, climbing equipment, easels, canoes, mountain boots, maps and music. My room overlooks the sea loch and there’s a telescope in it for looking across to the Isle of Skye plus an original 1970s fishtail surfboard, which makes me feel right at home.

A white weekend in Suffolk

It’s not snowing now, but it was! Jo, Lin and I were busy drinking tea in Jo’s 15th-century converted pub cottage (called The Black Eagle) when flakes of snow started floating down from above, outside. We shrieked and shrieked and watched an old lady indifferently walking by while snow settled thicker and thicker on her head until she eventually shook it off like a shaggy Highland cow. When the skies cleared we drove to the pretty beach town of Aldburgh with its colourful buildings and pebbled beach. It dropped to 2.5 degrees and would you know it, it snowed again. This time big flakes came down, covered the pebbles and turned the landscape snow white! We dashed from the car to photograph the spectacle, freezing ourselves, shrieking some more and landing up with out-of-focus photos. The day before was clear and bright and we walked along the Walberswick beach collecting stones with holes in them like beads. The locals call them hag stones. I couldn’t make a proper necklase cos I only found three. The beaches here are pebbled with incredible shapes and colours. We saw black-headed gulls, which are pretty, bought funky black shoes and drank several cups a tay.