My afternoon out part two; Wind up and Trees down

My Afternoon out part two;
Wind up and Trees down.

We have been to Boddin before with our paints and the intention was to find a sheltered spot and paint the sea in the midst of this wonderful wild and windy weather. But our plans were thwarted by the high winds.

We managed to park up in a sheltered spot at the top of the track looking down to the sea. This spot is particularly beautiful; it has the remains of ancient lime kilns and a ruinous old salmon fishing station.

As we looked south over the bay we could see the dust storms howling, we were battered by the winds but felt a safe enough distance from the dust. The sea was raging beneath us with waves crashing against the old lime kilns.

We decided to take a walk and see if we could find a sheltered spot where we could sit for a while and do some painting.

It didn’t take long to realise this was out of the question.

The winds were very high, we decided even walking along the grassy path above the bay was quite dangerous, we took a few good shots of the ruined salmon house and little white croft house and made our way back to the car.

We were only parked for about 15 /20 minutes before deciding we should leave, the wind was screaming and maybe a track at the edge of the sea cliffs wasn’t the best place to be in those weather conditions. The narrow winding road between the bay and the main road was lined with trees.

At the bottom of the track where we had parked was a farm, the last inhabited salmon cottage and two farm workers cottages. We wound our way to the top of the lane only to find we were totally trapped by fallen tree lying across the track.

The winds had taken the tree down and left it sprawled across the road in the 20 minutes we spent walking and taking photos. This was turning in to quite a day, first we were trapped in dust storms and then we were trapped by a fallen tree!!

Nothing for it but to back down to the farm and hope the farmer was a friendly man with a tractor.

Fortunately he was, he rigged his tractor up with lifting equipment and we followed him back up the lane to the tree. It didn’t take him long to shift the tree for us and let us escape.

Before we left I went out to thank him, turns out the farm was his fathers farm before him and neither of them had ever seen a dust storm like this one before……………..so it seems it really IS unusual around here.


More information about Boddin here.

http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/scotland/whereilive/coast/stages.shtml?walk=perthandtayside&stage=4