On one of my days off last week I went to the beach. That’s not unusual in itself, seeing as I live in Fife. We have 117 miles of coastline right here with glorious sandy beaches and wide open vistas. But sometimes, when I know the sun will be shining and the skies will be blue, there’s nowhere I’d rather be than on the west coast with its irresistible mix of beaches, hills, rocks and islands. My destination for the day was therefore the stretch of coastline between Arisaig and Morar. A long drive from Fife I admit, but as…

If you’ve been out in the hills lately you’ll hopefully have noticed shades of purple and pink standing out against the otherwise green landscape. Certainly that’s been my experience on two recent walks, one up Beinn a’ Bhuird via The Sneck in the Cairngorms and one along Loch Turret in Perthshire. The different shades I saw on those walks are the ones that accompany summer’s inevitable slide towards autumn, as the heathers burst into flower. I say heathers with an ‘s’, using the plural, because there are many species and it’s a name used quite widely (and loosely) to describe…

The Jewel of the Forth An island measuring 1500 by 500 metres mightn’t be the first place that springs to mind when you’re looking for an afternoon’s cliff-top walking or one of the greatest natural spectacles in the British Isles, but stick with me. With its imposingly sheer cliffs, solitary panoramic location and enormous expansive views of the Forth estuary, the Isle of May is well worth visiting for its modest walking potential alone. But if that wasn’t enough, the island is also blessed with an outrageous abundance of seabirds. Seen from the industrial Fife coast or from Edinburgh, where…

30 years ago I had a pet Venus Flytrap. I say ‘pet’ because it was more like an animal than a plant. In my tiny boy brain, plants didn’t eat meat. They ate water. Only animals ate meat. So surely this strange creature was an animal too? It certainly looked like an animal what with its ten enormous red mouths, fringed with dagger-like teeth. They’d sit there, motionless and open, waiting for flies to land on them before snapping shut. I was never lucky enough to see Venus trap a fly, and because I’d never seen the traps close I…

Stand on the summit of any munro and you’ll gaze out across a land of bog, rock, heather and grass. Sometimes it looks so timeless and primeval that it’s tempting to believe it has always had that stark, treeless beauty. But it’s an illusion. One that our hills almost manage to pull off, were it not for certain unexpected objects that shatter the illusion completely. Last week I was working my way around Beinn Bheag on Beinn a’ Ghlo when a skeletal object caught my attention just off the path. Bleached grey-white by age and the elements, half buried within…

Cloud. We're intimately familiar with it in Scotland. We spend one half of our leisure time cursing it for obscuring the mythical golden orb in the sky and pouring rain on us, and the other half blindly stumbling through it on murky hillsides. Such is life in Scotland, but if you’re anything like me then you’ve probably done more than your fair share of cursing AND blind stumbling this winter. Provisional statistics from the Met Office show that Scotland, on average, notched up just 100 hours of sunshine this winter. That’s barely more than one hour a day! 78% of…