A dark morning on the banks of Loch Rannoch

I came up on the train yesterday afternoon with a couple of South African bankers who’ve bought up a bed and breakfast in Pitlochry. I thought how sweet until they told me that rooms were between £170 and £180. Perthshire is clearly a lot more expensive than London! They tell me they get 85% of rooms booked over the summer.

But I’m not sure that this is summer or even spring. The snow is coming down and I don’t suppose that the things that are still free, the hills and mountains , feature much in the tourist brochures. Indeed, the tourists, according to my travelling companions are typically coming in the wake of Donald Trump, looking to invest large amounts of American money in golf courses and gated communities which allow them to enjoy exclusively the delights of this bonnie country.

For my family, the trip up to Kinloch Rannoch is an annual event which began in 1977 and continues in the same house on the banks of the Loch as ever it did. Back then the cost of living the Perthshire life was a fraction of what it is for today’s tourists but mountains like Ben Lawers and Schiehallion are immutable.

Quite what I’ll do these next seven years has not become clear. I have no car nor capacity to drive a car, having been prone to a kind of seizure akin to a stroke – something you can survive when walking , but not when driving on a public road.

I hope that I may get down to Perth and Fife to see the friends of this blog. I hope that I will be able to make it to Innerpeffray near Crieff, maybe to Mallaig by train from Rannoch or to the deep north by train from Blair Athholl.

While I have been writing these words the weather has changed and the view across the loch has changed

But best of all, is the quietness of this place as it is with the soft snow falling around me in late March.

This picture is what I can see when the sun arrives and whether it is bright or dull (as this blog started) , I breathe a different air! It is a different air up here from London and from the expenses of Pitlochry through which I passed as my gateway to beauty.

It is the air that clears to show me this astounding sight

Schielhallion