Black Isle: Tuesday 3rd May 2016
The Black Isle in NE of Inverness. It is not an island, but a peninsula, surrounded on three sides by water – the Cromarty Firth to the north, the Beauly Firth to the south, and the Moray Firth to the east. Beauly is at the western side of the peninsula and is the nearest town to Struy (where we are staying and is just a hamlet without shops - but it does have a hotel and a pub); it is 7 miles away (note that driving is in miles, but walking is in kilometres - probably because it makes it sound like we've walked further). We visited an RSPB reserve at Udale Bay, on the north shore of the Black Isle - the only visitor facility here is a hide, with no walking trail. We year-ticked Sandwich Tern and there was still a substantial flock of Pink-footed Geese here, but little of any real interest. Next we visited Rosemarkie on the south shore of the Black Isle. Here we did a varied 9km walking circuit. This started with about 4 km along the beach, which has some geological interest. Rosemarkie Bay lies along the Great Glen (Loch Ness etc) geological fault line and apparently the red rocks on the beach are Moine gneiss. However, our main concern was that the route description said it was impassable at high tide and we set off at 11am with a 1pm high tide. It would have been more interesting to report how we got stranded, but we didn't even get wet feet. Despite being a coastal walk we still managed 200m of ascent to "Brown Hill", up some very steep but nicely sheltered cliff steps, with a good variety of wild flowers in bloom. Eventually we returned to Rosemarkie via the Fairy Glen - in which we found a nice pair of Dipper.
After a late lunch on the sea-wall we headed for Ness Point at nearby Fortrose. This must be the best place in Britain to watch dolphins from the shore - Bottle-nose Dolphins come into Beauly Firth to calve, and put on a magnificent display of jumping out of the water and generally mooching about very close in to the beach. Photographing them is another matter - as they tend to be back under water in the eye-hand-shutter delay time.
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Plant of the day: Ramsons (Allium ursinum)
Family: Amaryllidaceae Britain's commonest garlic and the only one with broad leaves. |