Glen Strathfarrar

When I went out to Strathfarrar on 27th August it had been about 10 months since my last visit to the glen. Such a long gap between trips to this beautiful area of old Caledonian Forest is quite unusual for me, but that’s because I’ve been concentrating my photographic trips recently on Glen Affric. I’ve also been to Chile a couple of times in the intervening period, so the months had slipped by and I was quite overdue for a return to what is one of my favourite places in the Highlands. It was therefore with considerable anticipation of having an interesting day that I headed there on one of the last days of August, hoping to catch the end of summer in the glen. [Read more…] about Autumn approaches in Strathfarrar

A week after the day in Glen Strathfarrar that I wrote about in my last blog, I returned to the glen for another visit. Unlike the first trip, this time I went by myself and I stopped at different parts of the glen, to experience and photograph different sections of the forest there. In the week between these two visits, spring had advanced considerably, and just as I got to the entrance to the glen I saw a large expanse of bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) in flower, where none had been visible seven days earlier. [Read more…] about Spring in Strathfarrar, part 2 – flowers galore

During the first half of May I made a couple of trips out to Glen Strathfarrar, which contains one of my favourite remnants of the original Caledonian Forest. There’s extensive areas of old Scots pines (Pinus sylvestris) that are relatively little-visited by people, and the glen also contains a good number of aspen trees (Populus tremula), as well as some less common species such as oak (Quercus petraea) and juniper (Juniperus communis). The glen has a locked gate across the road into it, and only 25 cars are allowed in at any one time, so it’s always a quiet place to go and spend a day in the forest. [Read more…] about Spring in Strathfarrar, part 1

The end of August and early September is the peak time for common heather (Calluna vulgaris) to be flowering in the Highlands, and I usually aim to do a couple of days of photography of this seasonal phenomenon at different locations each year. This summer I decided to make a return visit to the Inchvuilt Wood in Glen Strathfarrar, which I’d first been to in 2012, but hadn’t gone back to since then. So it was that I set off there on the first Sunday in September, hoping to find the heather at its peak of blossom… [Read more…] about Return to Inchvuilt Wood

Spring seemed to have finally arrived in the Highlands at the end of the first week in April, when I made my first visit to Glen Strathfarrar for several months. On the previous Sunday, the last one in March, when I’d been out in the western Highlands I’d experienced driving snow, sleet and hail all day, with the temperature never rising about 2 degrees C. all day long, and it had felt like the middle of winter still. [Read more…] about Spring delight in Strathfarrar

Updated on 14 January 2014 with video footage at the end of the blog.

On a Sunday in mid-October, after a beautiful, still and misty morning at Loch Achilty, I drove to Glen Strathfarrar, where I was hoping to catch the autumn colours of the trees in their prime. Strathfarrar contains one of the best remnants of the original Caledonian Forest, with a large expanse of native pinewood, which rivals that of the much better known Glen Affric. It is therefore something of a hidden secret in the Highlands, and it is at its best in autumn, when the leaves on the broadleaved trees change colour before being shed. [Read more…] about Misty autumn day in Strathfarrar

In early April I made my first visit of the year to Glen Strathfarrar, one of my favourite native pinewood areas, and a glen which rivals Affric for its wildness and beauty. The road into the glen has a gate across it, which is closed to the public in the winter, only opening again at the beginning of April, so this was my first day out in the glen since last October, when I’d spent a day there photographing aspen trees (Populus tremula) at the peak of their autumn colours. [Read more…] about Beside the River Farrar