Features
Fuel poverty has prompted a revival of peat-cutting on Lewis video
IT IS early one morning in May, the Hebridean sky huge and blue, and Norman Macleod and Peter Urpeth, two old pals from Lewis, are walking out on to the moor, tools slung over their shoulders, ready for another day at the peats.
We are a mile or so inland from the village of Back, in the north-east of the island.
Walk of the week: The Fara
At long last a good day, forecasting blue skies and a gentle breeze, which coincided with convenient travel arrangements. I met Rhona at Dalwhinnie – our target a trip to The Fara that overlooks the northern end of Loch Ericht.
Outdoors: Road tip - the new Seed Truck
When is a truck not a truck? When it’s a Seed Truck. This one-off invention is soon to become one of the most celebrated vehicles on the road.
Outdoors: Have wheels will travel
Nothing is more natural and healthy than walking with your family. But surely the most beautiful countryside is too rugged to buggy in? Not so – here are three stunning walks you can do with even the tiniest tot.
Roger Cox: Passion for cycling brought new life to Peebles and the Tweed Valley
What would the Tweed Valley be like if mountain biking had never taken off as a mainstream sport? Quieter and less prosperous, no doubt, but according to Neil Dalgleish, director of the TweedLove Bike Festival, probably home to a much more elderly population as well.
Jonathan Trew: Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival
It’s not just T in the Park-style music festivals that have exploded in popularity over the last 15 years or so. Small scale regional arts festivals have also mushroomed – they just tend to involve less lager.
Walk of the week: Ettrick Water, Selkirk
SELKIRK bannocks are great – Queen Victoria is said to have enjoyed a taste when she visited the Borders town. Despite royal approval, it is the appreciation of our four-year-old daughter that counts.
Shooting and fishing: Crumpet has turned out to be the best shooting dog we have ever had
TODAY is Crumpet’s birthday. She is four. We shall have a two-barrel salute to celebrate the event at which I predict she will tear about like a blue-arsed fly looking for something to retrieve only to find that, not for the first time in our brief shooting career, there is nothing to pick up.
Outdoors: The grebe, once endangered thanks to the fashion industry, is thriving again
More times than not, my attempts to plan ahead so as to get a good view of an animal or bird ends in failure.
Walk of the Week: Carn na Caim
On the way to the hills the topic of football invariably crops up. Having lived close to Edinburgh’s Easter Road as a schoolboy, Hibs receive my support.
Roger Cox: When it comes to recording the magnitude of surfing exploits, size really matters
ONE rainy day last November, I started receiving a steady trickle of emails with links to the same jaw-dropping photograph: a surfer in a black-and-yellow wetsuit skittering down the face of a huge, aquamarine wall of water, looking for all the world like an exotic insect fleeing the maw of an about-to-snap venus flytrap.
Walk of the week: Faskally Wood, Pitlochry
FULL of the cold, I set off on a walk with the nagging thought that my ailment might be flu – or worse.
Leaving Pitlochry, the hustle and bustle gradually died away until the A9 was behind and Faskally Wood enveloped the senses.
Jonathan Trew: “Get off your horse and drink your Darjeeling”
The Borders and Ayrshire may well be the most exciting Scottish locations this weekend; particularly if you have a yen for line dancing and/or biographies. I suspect that any crossover between the two would offer slender pickings for the promoters although slim pickings does sound as though it could be an artist who might play at the Kelso Country and Western Music Festival this weekend.
Roger Cox: Plentiful snow is great, but if skiers can’t get to it they will slope off
Remember a few weeks ago, when I said the 2011/12 Scottish ski season had been a disaster? Well, I was wrong.
Walk of the Week: Tentsmuir
HOPING for drier weather, a few weeks ago Jimbo and I went to Tentsmuir, so named when a Danish fleet in the 1780s was shipwrecked and some of the sailors settled there, living in tents on the moor.
Outdoors: The Scottish Birdfair isn’t just for twitchers
THE growing awareness of our natural environment and the need to protect it is perhaps one of the most remarkable sea-changes in public perception to have occurred in society over the last 50 years or so.
Shooting and fishing: The Scottish Government persists in supporting what it agrees is the unsupportable
If I were a member of a salmon river board I’d be checking up on any vacant netting rights in my area before the netsmen get their hands on them.
Fly guys: Twitchers to flock to inaugural Scottish Bird Fair
WITH its vast areas of unspoiled natural beauty, Scotland is unsurprisingly a haven for a huge variety of wild birds.
Walk of the Week: Invertrossachs
THE Trossachs in summer can be a busy place. No wonder, really, with such picture-postcard scenery within an hour of Scotland’s two biggest cities.
Roger Cox: Enjoying the great outdoors is an art not a science, but for Generation Xbox, the formula now exists
ONE of the most effective ways to suck the magic out of a much-loved activity is to explain it in simple, ‘how to’ terms.
Shooting and fishing: They say the Government has made an absolute mess of managing the inshore fisheries
I WOULDN’T want to let the salmon farming industry off the hook, but could it be that unrestricted inshore trawling for prawns, scallops, cod and the like has had anything to do with the collapse of west coast sea trout fisheries?
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Scottish Fact of the Day: Loch Lomond
YOU may know it due to the song ‘The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond’, but the eponymous loch is in fact the largest expanse of fresh water in the whole of Britain.
Walk of the week: Elephant Rock, Sanda Island
ANDA Island, off the Mull of Kintyre, is a strange place, uninhabited save for a top-notch restaurant with extremely well appointed rooms.
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Roger Cox: A race beneath the shadow of the Forth bridges, one of the “best 500 runs in the world,” is 25 this year Picture gallery
I’M a control freak”, says John McKay, “and I’m quite happy to be called that in print.” To organise something like the AGR Black Rock ‘5’ for the last 21 years, as McKay has done, you’d need to be.
Outdoors: Scotland’s orchids have a captivating quality few other wildflowers can hope to match
CAUGHT in a frozen image in the corner of my eye, a grey sharp-winged bird had just rocketed over a small undulating crest by a tumbling Highland river.
Walk of the week: Logierait Bridge to Loch Skiach and Craig Lochie
IN THE midst of typical April weather, showers, hailstones and the return of snow, I remembered the high moorland area, south-west of Ballinluig, being saved for winter or inclement weather
- Scottish independence: I don’t want ‘separatism’ says Sir Tom Farmer
- Craig Levein insists Scotland will recover from US thrashing
- Scotland’s weather: Scots enjoy record temperatures over weekend
- James McPake set for Coventry talks as Hibs wait in wings
- Rangers administration: Duff & Phelps ‘hopeful’ that Taxman will agree to CVA
- Scottish independence: I don’t want ‘separatism’ says Sir Tom Farmer
- Craig Levein insists Scotland will recover from US thrashing
- Scottish independence: Labour voters ‘will deliver independence’
- James McPake set for Coventry talks as Hibs wait in wings
- Scotland’s weather: Scots enjoy record temperatures over weekend
- Cigarettes to be given out
- Sniper celebrates with cigar after killing Taliban officer
- Dubai jet-set ready for first-class Scotland
- Obituary: Tom Scott, Loch Lomond legend and ‘laird’ of Inchmurrin Island who saved many lives on the loch
- Edinburgh marathon: Kenyan John Mutai edges thrilling capital race
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Weather for Edinburgh
Monday 28 May 2012
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: 9 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 15 mph
Wind direction: North east
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: 10 C to 16 C
Wind Speed: 10 mph
Wind direction: North east
