some pictures, some words

To Scotland and both top and bottom corners of Wales this last week. The Scots trip was to photograph the garden at Crarae on Loch Fyne, though it has to be said that the real high (or low) point came with a possibly illicit visit to the anatomy museum at the Gormenghast-like University of Glasgow. The university buildings are awe-inspiring, late Victorian Gothic with bits of Scottish Renaissance mixed in. Where Pugin’s buildings look as if they might lift off, these massive towers seem like natural outcrops from some geological layer deep in the earth’s crust. At the base of one of the towers steps covered in pigeon droppings spiral their way down into darkness. Eventually one emerges into a dim light and a smell of formalin, and enters the museum itself, filled with William Hunter’s beautifully prepared eighteenth-century specimens, bones, and fortunately  unidentifiable objects floating in murky bottles.

Foetal skeletons

Next to Bodnant in North Wales, where the azaleas were rioting their little hearts out all over the precipitous slopes of the dell. I was last there on the same day two years ago to shoot the laburnum tunnel (then at its peak). This year it wasn’t nearly out; this Spring it seems we’re running about two weeks behind.

Azaleas at Bodnant

Finally to the other corner of Wales, to accompany a friend sailing to the bird sanctuary of Skomer Island, where we passed the night in an anchorage of amazing beauty, surrounded by every variety of seabird, and seals full of the joys of Spring. What a delight, after far too many motorway miles, to wake there early on a still Sunday morning.

Skomer