A clattering

July 4, 2021, 10:46 am , by Newsroom

Richard Lutz heads for cover….

‘We’re in for a clattering,’ says Gary as he picks up his morning paper at The Harbour Stores which sits on Strathcarrick harbour. To me, in this season of football and The Euro Cup, a clattering means what a house-sized centre back would do to a chippy winger, spreading him like warm butter across a green field.

But the Clattering our Gary refers to is the storm coming in from the southwest…the weather is always whisking in from the southwest. So much so that here on the Scottish west coast, I listen to the Belfast weather knowing that in 90 or so minutes we’ll be getting the Northern Irish sun or rain or even Gary’s clattering of thunder with our names etched in its wet strength.

The rain over, we are blessed with warm sun. Not the blazing stuff that is burning up the west coast of the States (my brother reports in from Spokane, Washington, hot hot hot in a 36C morning). But the soft touch of a Scottish summer. I decide to walk from Auldglen back to Strathcarrick’s Harbour Stores at the harbour. The farm tracks, empty lanes and old carriageways are lined with bouncing Rananunclusa, better known to us mortals as buttercups:

They’re accompanied by red campion …..

and tiny violet orchids, unnamed and quiet ….

Then to an old lane lined with old twisted beeches, eerie, never pruned or, even more simply, refusing to be pruned. They lean into and over the track…

Off to the side, lit by afternoon sun, is a tiny pond filled with lilies ready to blossom. A broken quay juts into the forgotten water:

There’s a sound among the reeds. Sometimes a pair of swans use it to hide baby cygnets. But instead, a long brown animal slithers in the muddy shallows. It could be an otter, maybe even a lost beaver (maybe…probably not ) whose re emergence miles away in the Cairngorm Mountains is being excitedly reported by environmentalists but frowned upon by farmers. I don’t know. The animal is there and then gone inside the reed bed.