On Thursday 21st July we drove into Stornoway, stopping on the Braighe to photograph some birds.
A Common Gull which, despite its name, is not so common.
Red-throated Diver.
Cormorant.
At the Co-op a Hooded Crow was seeing what it could find to eat around the car park.
Just outside the castle gates were some familiar sights.
And an unfamiliar one.
When you consider how many hundreds of thousands (millions?) of barrels of herrings used to pass through Stornoway in the heyday of the herring industry it is ironic that these in the garden centre probably came from the main land and were made just recently. Stornoway Historical Society has a good page describing the work of the herring girls.
Inside the castle gates the golf course is bordered by trees with the most splendid mosses and lichens on thewir trunks. It is amazing to think that a few centuries back all our British trees would have been coated thus, before the industrial revolution created the pollution that has extinguished such lichen from most of the country.
