All Wellie and Good

A beautiful winter shot of Orion over the Ayrshire coast. Photo by John Spooner via Flickr.

It's a crispy-cold and sunlit day, with scratchy snow showing on the mainland peaks. It looks like t-shirt weather from in here but, at around 2 degrees with windchill outside, I wouldn't recommend it.

The bright, dry weather and longer days have been thoroughly liberating. My wife came home from work early on Monday and we had time for an hour-long trek along the 'flotsam' side of the bay before the light was gone. Along the way we spoke to a friend who had caught up with us in his quest to claim a dented blue plastic barrel, which he intended cut down and use as an animal feed container.

We made it as far as the jaggy rocks two-thirds of the way towards the point before accepting that we were running out of daylight. The wobbly, rounded stones along this stretch of shore aren't conducive to surefootedness in low light, especially when you're wearing too-big Argyll wellies. My wife has snug snowboots with chunky and grippy soles, so she was somewhat more gazelle-like (in relative terms) than me in the failing light.

The views (combined with the cold air) were quite breathtaking. Two ships passed in the dusk far out in the Sound. A heron hunched, old-man-like, in the steel-flat water. They seem to like these low light conditions - I assume that it's easier for them to spot the flash of small fish than when the sun is higher in the sky.

The bright stars of Orion were just beginning to show in the east as we tramped, happy and becalmed, up the drive to our cosy-warm house.