I took a short walk around Stirling in ice and snow. Overcast boring skies meant a focus on the buildings and streets. The icicles are interesting hanging at an angle from The Golden Lion Hotel, Stirling. You can see there has been a constant left-right wind blowing up King street meaning as the icicle forms, it grows at an angle.
Early November flurries of snow carpeted the Ochils bringing errie quiet, until Poppy arrives. Bounding in circles, snorting and rolling in the cold stuff, a happy dog.
More shots in the Lochaber area on Scotland’s north-west coast.
An early November snowstorm in that cold winter of 2010 brought bliss for Poppy. She does enjoy tearing around, burying her head in the snow and snorting the stuff up her hooter (a nose for my readers in farther bits of the earth).
The Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation have given the new Clackmannanshire Bridge a “Highly Commended” in their annual awards. A perfect excuse to add my own gratitude to its existence, albeit late. I spent sixteen years travelling between Clackmannanshire and the Lothians in an earlier career. Each morning’s commute had a ten minute queue to negotiate Kincardine Village then cross the Forth and on to the M9. The return journey was similarly corrosive of productive time. Tapping the steering wheel for thirty minutes and more on a Friday. Adding-up this unproductive sinkhole reveals a total of thirty one days lasting twenty-four hours, spent waiting to cross the Forth. Can you believe that ?
So any credit paid to this new bridge, its Architects, Construction teams, Planners etc is deserved. If it was completed sixteen years ago I could have walked the West Highland Way, painted the Himalaya in oils and still had time to build my sons a treehouse using fine-sanded matchsticks ! This photograph was taken shortly after the bridge opened in February 2009.
Gartmorn Dam, Clackmannanshire is still heavily iced over, but pockets of meltwater have created interesting patterns that caught my eye. The more time spent there, the more I saw which is a theme I plan to return to.
