It feels as if I’ve been writing about our autumn holiday in 2024 for a very long time. As it turns out, I’ve just looked back, and I wrote the first blog post in the series, about Godstow in Oxfordshire, in October of that year.
Anyway, after we had a wonderful break on the Isle of Skye, our next stop was eastern Scotland, where we hadn’t been for quite some time. After a very long drive, we arrived in the rolling farmland of Angus to revisit some old haunts.
The weather was very pleasant, so I managed to photograph some of the scenes that have stuck in my memory ever since I first visited 20 years earlier: hay bales ready to be collected from the fields, the wonderful rattling of the sea as it hits the pebbles on Auchmithie beach, and some new sights, too.
After a couple of days in the very familiar landscape of Angus, we started heading south towards our next extended stay in Cumbria. We decided to stop at the Kelpies, two huge metallic sculptures of horse heads that the artist Andy Scott placed in the landscape near Falkirk in 2014. After wandering around, taking a few nice photos and having lunch at the café, we also decided to visit the Falkirk Wheel, a tremendous example of canal-based engineering that is famous in this part of Scotland.
There were plenty of people there watching the activity, and I set up my camera to capture a rather wobbly time-lapse as a boat entered; the lower lock was then lifted up to the upper canal channel so that the boat could continue its journey.
Visiting this part of the world is always lovely because it holds so many memories going back so many years for both Jo and me. We don’t get the chance to visit as often as we would perhaps like, but we certainly couldn’t complain that we got to see wonderful views and visit a few familiar places this time around.
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