On a bog carnivorous butterworts extract the nutrients they need from insects trapped in their sticky leaves. 

What better way to spend your holiday than examining the contents of an owl pellet on the moor?

 

Today is your last chance to buy at The Music Box in Blairgowrie.

More temporary summer dwellings.

“When berry time comes roond each year
Blair’s population’s swellin,
There’s every kind o picker there
And every kind o dwellin.
There’s tents and huts and caravans,
There’s bothies and there’s bivvies
And shelters made wi tattie-bags
And dug-outs made wi divvies…”

from ‘THE BERRY FIELDS O BLAIR’
 by Belle Stewart

 

Summer has always been a time of temporary homes: sheiling, bothy, caravan, wigwam, bivouac, tent, kata.

1.9 cm of peat have formed since I last stood at 1,214 metres atop Ben Lawers. Within that time Joe has, in his nine of these years, grown strong enough to reach the summit. Whilst the mountain has remained constantly just short of 4,000 feet it has grown on itself violet Alpine gentians, delicate pink moss campions; on its rugged tumbled rocks nurtured intricate, slow lichens; been a home to redpoll, hovering hen harriers, fluttering mountain ringlet butterflies, throaty crawing ravens; and punctured the North Atlantic clouds to form, even at 3,500 feet up, peat.

July/January: two halves of the year on Rannoch Moor.

The Rannoch Moor, peat paradise.

Fire-water. Whisky warehouses at Glen Turret.

Monday morning cooking breakfast at the Nordic kata in the silver birch woods, Perthshire.