At Last ! Snow and Ice

No Wigtownshire Ramblers this weekend, I wasn't prepared to jeopardise my recovery from my ailments. However the arrival of a little snow and plenty of ice is always a good cure for my sniffles, and I enjoyed a little stroll which has put me well on the road to recovery.

I parked up by the Penkiln Burn at Auchenleck.

A snowy Drigmorn above Auchinleck House

(A bit of an anomaly here, it seems the area is Auchenleck, but the house and the loch are Auchinleck) 

Lots of ice and a little snow

Auchinleck house, a little closer than the first picture

Hard mud and reflections

Fence top growth

Reflective

I love this picture, looks almost an oil painting.

It's water bubbles running through ice on a rocky surface

Plants being encased in ice under a small waterfall

Ditto 

Log Pile

To the right of the smaller hill stands Drigmorn, Red Gairy and Millfore

I'm treading carefully

A new view for me

This is Auchinleck Loch

Same as above but I needed to get higher

Shepherds Cottage Drigmorn

This was once the home of  Ina Chesney, a mentally handicapped young woman, who, in the 1940s, lived with her mother in this remote cottage

 There's a story and painting in the Galloway Gazette about this young lady

Ina's Story

On my way back, is that more snow in the clouds over the Galloway Hills ?

The little and large of bridges

I'm feeling better already !

A Trolley Push Around Scotland-A Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On

I'm confined to the house keeping warm and shaking off headaches,a sore throat and a runny nose. Making this video took my mind off it

 
After a struggle at the border she was soon on her way even getting over to the Western Isles

The music is courtesy of YouTube's Audioswap Library and is by the Bob Mitchell Orchestra

Photographic enhancements on a dull day, and a poem by the bard

Tuesday the 24th of January. Quite a miserable day weatherwise but I'll head out and take a few pictures. The first one I took early in the day from my front door.

Picasa has a border application which I've used.Unfortunately I've made all the outer borders dark which doesn't work with an already dark background. Ah well ! It's a learning curve.

At the back of this view (if you could see it) is the snow capped Cairnsmore of Fleet

I went down the river Cree to Parkmaclurg.

Here I'm opposite the Carse of  Barr

Just to the right of this point the railway used to cross.Wooden stumps can still be seen when the tide is out

This is the view east towards Palnure with a misty Blair hill behind

Here it is on Clevr

                             Panorama of Palnure from Parkmaclurg on CleVR.com

This is the view back to Blackcraig

A little further south  the river's meander has created a large sandbank.

It's often a haven for various birds, today there's a lone heron

A zoom over to Upper Barr finds a flock of gulls and the Wigtown bus 

Added at the last minute with a light border 

Carseminnoch

It being Burns night tonight I thought an apt poem to accompany this post would be
 'The Flowery Banks O' Cree'

Here is the glen, and here the bower 
All underneath the birchen shade; 
The village-bell has told the hour, 
O what can stay my lovely maid? 


'Tis not Maria's
 whispering call; 
'Tis but the balmy breathing gale, 
Mixt with some warbler's dying fall, 
The dewy star of eve to hail. 

It is Maria's voice I hear; 
So calls the woodlark in the grove, 
His little, faithful mate to cheer; 
At once 'tis music and 'tis love. 

And art thou come! and art thou true! 
O welcome dear to love and me! 
And let us all our vows renew, 
Along the flowery banks of Cree.

Wigtownshire Ramblers Knockman Wood Garlies Castle January 2012

It's Saturday the 21st of January.
Today's walk led by Shorty is an amalgamation of a few walks we've done before.It's also an area I've covered myself quite a lot.
Here's some old links.
A walk-in-black-forest-or-knockman-wood
Garlies Castle
January 2009 walk
July 2011 walk

We broke the mould today.There were again 19 of us, but walking in from their home in Newton Stewart our newest members swelled the total to 21.The walk start is at Knockman Wood Car Park just a couple of hundred metres from Boreland Lodge.

It's wet and windy so good photographs are few since the camera stayed in the case a lot of the time.
All pictures today were taken on the Fuji S7000.It will be going back in storage as a back up now I realise my Powershot is a superior camera.A look at the unnamed chambered cairn was our first stop.

The cairn on top of Knockman Hill was our second objective.

The sky was a mixture of dark and light cloud. Good for silhouettes. Wigtown bay was a bright reflective sheen.

To the south, Cairsmore of Fleet was under cloud.

It's too windy to tarry too long so soon we're moving across the heather in an easterly direction.

Underfoot is dead bracken, heather, tussocks and bog................. but we've had worse.

Now here's an interesting ring of stones.I don't know and can't find any thing about it but I'm sure it wasn't built special for a couple of trees.

Trees were very much a feature of today's walk.
Another thing about the Fuji camera was the pictures I thought I'd taken but were missing when I looked later, the Evergreen Oak tree being one.

Now we've reached a path which we'll follow for a while.The hood on the walker on the right looks odd, I'll crop it for a closer look ?.

It's probably a manifestation of one of the saints. I'm not religious but January the 21st is St Agnes Day so who am I to argue !

Ahead of us now is Knockbracks with Drigmorn beyond.

The first of a couple of burn crossings.

Now we are moving south past the ruins of a former settlement. Probably connected to the  nearby Garlies Castle

Upon reaching the castle, and after a historical description from Shorty we had lunch.

A tour of the castle followed lunch.

Back on the move the most difficult burn crossing was the Peat Rig Strand.

Thanks to Scoop for the above collage.She got me nicely with a foot in the burn.

Now came a long squelchy section to reach the track that runs alongside the Penkiln burn.

This is nowadays known as Glenmalloch Lodge.It was originally built as a schoolhouse thanks to the philanthropic Harriet, Countess of Galloway. It can now be  rented from the Landmark Trust.
Click here for details.There's also a link on that page for a pdf giving a short history of the property. Very interesting.

With the sky as it was today, the bare trees looked particularly striking.

The farmers cairn at Torbain was our last point of interest.
A number of speculative answers were given to the origin of the initials MM on one of the boulders.Mine was Marilyn Monroe, but dismissed as probably wrong.
After a short walk back to the cars, a large group of Ramblers made their way to Cinnamon  for refreshments.A great way to end an excellent walk

Resurrected Fuji S7000, Walk Recce and Picasa Effects

Been full of cold this week so I've been hibernating since last weeks walk with the ramblers. I did however manage a walk out yesterday, Thursday the 19th of January. I took my oldest camera, my Fuji S7000 with me. It was it's unreliability and repair costs that caused it to be shelved. Although It's still problematic, I've found with perseverance I can take half decent pictures with it.

Here are a few of the pictures I took. I've also been playing with some of Picasa's new features.
In the sequence that follows, the first picture is the untouched original, the second the Picasa effect.

Comic Book 

Invert Colours

Museum Matte

Pencil Sketch

Posterise

Vignette

Lomo-ish

I don't know  ?

They add a different slant to the photographs, I reckon they'd certainly be beneficial perhaps in a publication.

The last two do it for me.