Just after eight last night we walked to the top of the
cliff to see what all the noise was about. It was about thousands of very
vocal seabirds. One hundred thousand breeding pairs are said to inhabit
the cliffs at Crawton every year. The largest colony on mainland Britain.
This morning the wind blew through gorse bushes, their golden pea shaped blooms quivering in the salty air. Beside us a tractor spread fertiliser on a field of brown corduroy. Before too many visitors arrived we took the three mile walk, there and back, along the cliff top path in search of puffins. The acrid stench of ammonia from the droppings of the birds was offensive to our nostrils.
Clung to the cliffs were gulls, shags, fulmers, kittiwakes, guillemots, but no puffins. That was until we happened to meet a local man who showed us one solitary puffin perched on a ledge, then a second. But no more.
Wow! We'd seen puffins and were beyond excited. It was right up there in one of life's great moments.
Puffins ticked off, we needed to return to the Cairngorms. The falls of Feugh provided a pleasant stopping off point along the way. Our destination was the visitor centre at Muir of Dinnet. We stayed here back in the autumn of 2021 when we were the only van. Today there are four of us, including a lady from Germany who we stayed alongside at North Tolsta, just above Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis eleven days ago. We wondered where she had ventured to after.
More walking, to the Burn o' Vat, a large water gouged bowl that you enter by walking on slippery wet stones. Then up through the trees back to Marge where we crossed the road to take the Parkin's Moss Trail.
In total another three miles on top of this morning's walk. It's all
about the steps Marge.
