Blue Sky Walks.

Uh oh, cloudy weather is now forecast for the coming week, I've been getting used to lovely blue skies every day even though it's still not been especially warm.

Here to remind me how beautiful it was for the first week of the Easter break are photos from two walks, one on Friday when the children and I took a picnic and stayed out all day, and a shorter one on Sunday when hubby was able to join us.

The first is to the loch which we visit often, but this time we managed to find lots of areas we'd not explored before...

 Little jetty, love the sparkles on the water.

Post & wire.

A view of the folly from the little beach where we ate our picnic lunch. 

The children their picnic quite slowly...

 

 ...I passed the time by photographing more posts and wires.

 The patch of red dogwood bottom right is quite striking.

 Off they go, under the arching branches.

 Now we're climbing away from the loch into the woods.

Sky so blue.

A climbs a tree, cool wellies!

 Burnt stump detail.

 A view across the loch as it narrows.

 Looking in the other direction.

They're still happy to wander on, we're about to explore the old church ahead.

Stonework detail.

The church dates from 1504.

 

 

 It's possible to go inside and admire the stone carvings.

 A more recent carving (I like the orb effect from a grubby camera lens)

 Back outside.

We're quite far from the car now for little legs, it took a very long time to walk back!

Red berries against blue sky.

A distant line of colourful rowing boats.

A tatty old umbellifer seed head.

Shadow detail.

Made it! We were way too late for an ice cream at the cafe and seem to have collected more sticks than normal, including a rather large one which was used as a lightsabre for a lot of the time - we've been enjoying discovering/re-discovering the Star Wars films recently!

Now to our second walk which was at the nearby country park.

Still a few patches of snow here and there. I like the row of trees on the horizon and the rusty fence posts in the foreground.

 Ahead lie some old farm buildings, but our path is to the left.

 Into the woods past the owl carving.

 Back out into the open to climb the hill.

 Sheep block the path; they soon turned tail as N approaches them though.

 Baa.

 Here they are in the middle distance, strung out in a big long line.

 A view from atop the hill. The tumbledown farm buildings in amongst the trees are the same ones from the second photo.

The cairn at the top is in the process of being rebuilt.

The abandoned farm again with a steep section of hill in the foreground, must go and explore it one day.

Lastly, a saltire spotted whist making our way back down through the woods.

We've had an excellent first week of the break. I wonder what the second week holds...