I love my fortnightly drive to Melrose when I have my wednesday stint in The Crafters shop. The drive along the ettrick valley is a meandering, sometimes single track road, with it’s own micro climates in places. Always beautiful light on the ever changing coloured hills depending on the season it happens to be. Sometimes scary when the marsh land is flooded and the road is somewhere there under the water. Birds – lapwings, buzzards, osprey, crossbills to name a few. An abundance of hares one year and then none the next. Deer venturing out of the woods to drink from the burns and rivers running alongside the road. Radio 4 or silence or my own thoughts and the occasional stop to breathe in and smell the air or take a photo like this one yesterday of the beautiful white swans who have chosen loch tima to live on and raise young every year. Mid summer and the living is easy, the fish are jumping and the bracken is high
Thank you for sharing this. I am an author who has decided to use the valley as the setting for part of my book. I have never been there but the location is perfect for me. You have fleshed out the bones of my own impressions.
Thank you Gail, how interesting that the valley is going to appear in your book. You must let us know when the book is published.
I used to be married to the forester who actually created Loch Tima – I well remember his soul-searching as the work progressed – only one JCB and its drivers great fear was the possibility of strong wind causing waves which could break the dam – it is a simple earth dam – so he put in islands and peninsulas to break the wave power and provide habitats for wildlife
How interesting. It’s such a lovely Lochan. He did a great job