Merry Xmas

As the holidays begin and the year draws to a close I’d like to wish everyone a Merry Xmas and the hope for a good 2010. Here in Strathspey the snow is deep and the landscape in full glorious winter raiment. The track to my house is snowbound and the road into town icy and “passable with care”. Yesterday me and my younger step-daughter, who is home for Christmas, hauled supplies up to the house on a sledge and in heavy packs – the heaviest I’ve carried for a few years! And today we went skiing in the fields and woods, pushing tracks through the soft snow and admiring the drooping limbs of conifers heavy with snow and the fine tracery of ice and thin lines of snow on the birches. Across a dip in the fields Castle Grant rose grey and white, a sombre block of stone. As the land darkened the sky above the castle glowed pink with a strange luminosity and depth. This intense brightness only covered a small area of sky. Elsewhere the sky was fading into a dull and chilly blue-grey. A quarter moon hung high above the trees. We have been watching Sherlock Holmes stories on DVD on recent evenings and Hazel remarked that the castle and the light looked just right for an episode. I thought it looked similar to the castle in the Dr Who episode “Tooth and Claw”. We listened for the sound of werewolves or sinister hounds but none came. Just the silence of nature on a cold winter’s night and the gentle swish of skis on snow. It was, as always, enough.

Photo info: Hazel skiing. Canon EOS 450D, Canon 18-55 IS @40mm, 1/100@ f5.6, ISO 200, raw file converted to JPEG in Lightroom 2.6

December sunset over Castle Grant. Canon EOS 450D, Canon 18-55 IS @55mm, 1/100@ f5.6, ISO 200, raw file converted to JPEG and cropped in Lightroom 2.6