Allt na Beinne

Thaw at Dog Rose from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo. 
There are two lone Dog Rose bushes at the head of Strathnairn where the river rises, a place we've been visiting over thirty years in winter and summer. Yesterday Amy, my son-in-law Guy, and I went with four dogs, Oscar, Lulu, Cookie and Malo. Pass through a couple of gates beside the isolated part-derelict, part-rebuilt farmstead stables at Achvraid (field of the upland) and continue a hundred yards, picking a way over boulder strewn heather, speargrass and rushes, wending between separate streams of cold clear water - Allt na Beinne (Burn of the hill) - tumbling down between Beinn Acha (hill of the upland) and Carn na Saobhaidh (Cairn of the den of the fox). Such a cacophony! Something about the rush of the burn and the cracking of the ice set the dogs dashing back and forth, barking and trying to grab pieces of ice in their teeth.

Our friend Liz said "The brazen faced old optimist..."

** **
Meanwhile our friends Mark and Sally who live up the street from us in Ano Korakiana have managed, at the last moment, to get news of a room cancellation at a friends' guest house in Ano Pedina and driven over, with black dog Teal, to Zagori on the mainland to welcome the new year at a favourite place twenty one miles north of Ioannina. [In rough translation here I read personal accounts recorded by travel writer Antonis Iordanoglou - Αντώνης Ιορδάνογλο - about how a place that was lost, was rediscovered and is now being renewed; a local sustainable economy for visitors that turns away from a half-century of land prostitution that has blighted the littorals of half the world.]

Άνω Πεδινα στα Ζαγοροχώρια «Εδώ διώχνεις το ρολόι από το χέρι σου»