Marinas - Wick Marina Scotland

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Wick Harbour Festival in Caithness, Highland Scotland. It was a brilliant event and I enjoyed the time spent. The event is on each year around the end of June and is well worth a visit. The event had good fortune with lovely sunny weather.

The whole community gets involved and the primary schools each had an exhibit on a different topic - often to do with the sea and also the environment. There was sea trips available as well as entertainment - music and traditional dancing along with many other events during the day. The HM Coastguard helicopter rescue was put on hold due to the rather strong currents running outside the harbour area, however the Coastguard helicopter gave everyone an exciting demonstration and landed on the harbour.

A few pictures of the harbour festival are shown below.







I will be putting up more pictures of the marina on Caithness and Sutherland website as well as creating free jigsaw puzzles with some of my photos.

While looking on the web for Wick Marina I looked on the fantastic Marinas website - unfortunately I did not find any information on Wick.

Crannog - Prehistoric Scotland

A Crannog is a prehistoric artificial island where people usually built wooden structures where they lived. The photographs shown below are of a Crannog on Loch Watten in Caithness, Scotland. You can see this crannog fairly clearly from the main road and for over a year now I have looked at it and wanted to get a closer view, so off fishing I went and with my trusty electric motor steamed up to see the Loch Watten Crannog.

As with most crannogs there is not that much to see, if you half close your eyes you can imagine people, families living on this raised area of the loch in the distant past, at the moment it is home to several species of birds. I also videod the crannog and I hope to upload this to YouTube sometime soon.

Caithness and Sutherland has thousands of remnants of prehistoric communities with standing stones, cairns and old castles dotted throughout the land - they are also marked on OS Maps of the area.



View from the boat of the small artificial island on Loch Watten

Scotland Croft

Crofting Life

Have you a dream of living on a Highland Croft in the Highlands of Scotland? well there is an opportunity to buy a croft tenancy and decrofted house on North Uist. The croft has over 10 acres of land and 1/33 of shared grazing over a larger area. The landscape of North Uist is fantastic and you would be part of a crofting community. This island is one of lochs, hundreds of inland fresh water lochs full of wild brown trout as well as many rivers and sea lochs with salmon and sea trout. The croft has a small jetty / boat tie up so you can even have your own boat for fishing or sailing. We have detailes of this North Uist Croft for sale on our Hebrides website as well as on the Property in Scotland website - Hebridean Croft page.

Scotland Outdoors

It is all gloom and today today with the World's Stock Markets - it appears to be in free fall so after reading this depressing news on the BBC website I noticed photographs of mushrooms in Scotland that was being featured on Landward (which I missed) however I did discover another aspect of the huge BBC website, namely Scotland Outdoors - full of photographs and information on Scotland.

Visit Scotland Outdoors and discover more on Scotland

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/outdoors/

Mushrooms

A quick post so that I don't forget to add a link to a website I discovered on mushrooms, namely Rogers Mushrooms - a truly useful site for everyone interested in wild mushrooms and collection mushrooms for food.
I must admitt that I love collecting wild mushrooms, yet I am always worried about picking the wrong species and making myself (and others) ill, so I tend to stick to mushrooms that are easily identified as good for food.
Having a good book with lots of pictures does help and you can buy the Rogers Mushrooms book from Amazon - Wildlife and Nature Books aStore - Rogers Mushrooms or simply browse the section on mushrooms for many other books on the subject.