Entries tagged with holidays

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Torchwood

So apparently we need to be told that Wales is in the UK. You don't say.

What they need to improve the programme (well actually, they need a lot to improve the programme...) is a greyhound on the beach:

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holidays,
nature

Photo highlights of my Scottish holiday

There are more on Facebook if you're interested.

( More photos... )

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holidays,
nature

Outer Hebrides wildlife

Video footage of the golden eagles and otters I saw on Lewis and North Uist respectively. OK, the camerawork isn't exactly BBC Natural History department, but the footage of eagles was good enough for an RSPB guy to confirm that they were golden eagles rather than white-tailed or even just buzzards.

Entry tags:

holidays,
nature

Things you spot when examining holiday snaps more closely

On North Uist, I stopped to take a wide angle shot of a large herd of mute and whooper swans. Basically a big bunch of not especially uncommon white birds.

Examining the photo on the camera's own screen didn't reveal anything extraordinary. Getting the camera home and looking at the photo on a 24" monitor revealed an extra bird in the bottom-left corner... (Click on the photo to make it bigger.)

That, my friends, is a male hen harrier.

Entry tags:

cars,
holidays

Oban to Campbelltown to Faslane to Wrexham to Northwich to Mickle Trafford to Wrexham to Watford

Saturday

Ever since I started work as a trainee accountant, I have always wanted to go to Campbeltown, at the southern end of Kintyre. You see, the firm I worked for then, Kidsons Impey, had an office there. I wondered quite what commerce there was in such an out of the way place to warrant a national firm of chartered accountants having an office there.

I still don't know.

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Sligachan to Applecross to Oban

Friday

My father had told me that the Old Man of Storr, a rock pinnacle in north east Skye was worth seeing. That would also take me past Portree, where there is an RSPB exhibition about white-tailed eagles. If I wasn't going to see any (and believe me, I kept my eyes open and my roof down today), at least I could find an expert to identify which species I had filmed.

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North Uist, Grimsay, Benbecula, South Uist, Eriskay and Skye

Thursday

Still darkish when I got up, although it wasn't painfully early by any means. The man in the hotel tipped me off that there were definitely a pair of white-tailed eagles in the north-east of the island. Weather and visibility were both excellent, so that's where I went.

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Harris and Lewis

No, not a comedy double act, but the northern part of the Outer Hebrides.

Wednesday

Today was a good day.

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cars,
holidays

Bettyhill to Ullapool to Uig to Tarbert

Tuesday: Gorgeous weather as I set off early(ish) from the faded Bettyhill Hotel.

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cars,
holidays

Watford to Newcastle to 'The Roman Wall' to Edinburgh to Inverness to Bettyhill

I'm on holiday at the moment - a solo driving holiday around the more distant bits of Scotland. Bunn isn't with me on account of her having considerably less holiday allowance than me this year and not fancying a week of pretty much nothing but driving.

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Entry tags:

holidays,
nature

Boring holiday video

Back in the old days, people would expect you to sit through an evening's worth of holiday video footage. Nowadays thanks to cheap video editing software, you can reduce a week and a bit of holiday to eight minutes and 38 seconds...

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clothes,
holidays

Boots

Just had a mostly frustrating, but ultimately successful expedition to Tavistock to buy walking boots.

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holidays

Fossil hunting

Just back from a long weekend in Charmouth, on Dorset's Jurassic Coast. Bunn will no doubt post lots of photographs featuring dogs later, but I thought I'd just post to say that we found a good number of fossils. Several ammonites, several belemnites and a couple of bivalves.

Oh, and a couple of things that looked like fossilised shoggoths.

Not bad for our first time.