Author Archives: Jim

Conditions were perfect: a good aurora forecast, a good weather forecast and a new moon, thus a nice dark sky. The Northern Lights, or Aurora borealis had already been seen in parts of Scotland a couple of weeks before but not in Knoydart which had been sitting under oppressive dark clouds for months. I’d been meaning to get a timelapse of the aurora all winter and wasn’t going to let this chance pass me by. So, I cycled five miles with a bike trailer laden with camera gear, down jacket, flask of tea and some of my wife’s home-made flapjack, up to “Doune Top” near Airor where you can get a clear view over the back end of Skye to Torridon in the north.

Last week the sun spewed out an enormous solar flare which we were told would light up the northern skies with a fantastic auroral display. The skies above Knoydart were, as usual, hidden by a thick fug of grey cloud so I hopped on a boat and then drove over 100 miles to Findhorn on the east side of Scotland where the sky was clear. I parked up by the sand dunes and set my camera facing north over the Moray Firth, hoping to capture a timelapse of charged particles bouncing about in the upper atmosphere – the northern lights.

A few shots from my walk round the Northern Corries of the Cairngorms yesterday with old pal and fellow Knoydartian Tommy. As much as I love Knoydart you can’t beat the Cairngorms for a taste of the Arctic in Britain. And while it was raining all weekend in Knoydart the Cairngorm plateau was bathed in sunshine. Got to love that rain shadow effect. Very little snow left though – just large patches in the north-facing corries.

After what feels like three months of solid rain and cloud, we finally have a little bit of high pressure tickling the west coast of Scotland, teasing us with clear skies and dry, frosty mornings. So, I’m making the most of it and having a dabble at some timelapses of stars. Click on the video to see the results.

After twelve days in the balmy shires of southern England I made it home to Knoydart on 2nd January.

This was the first time I’d missed Hogmanay in Inverie and judging by the weary faces and stench of rotten alcohol it was as good as ever. Everyone told me the weather had been terrible: “the worst winter ever”.

In Knoydart today the sun rose at 9am and will set at 3.42pm giving us just six hours, forty-two minutes of daylight. Of course, those times are for when the sun actually rises above the horizon, assuming the horizon is unobstructed. We’ve got lots of hills here in Knoydart so the sun doesn’t actually appear above Beinn Buidhe to the south-east of me until about 10am. It then slouches its way across the southern skyline, lighting up our day for a few hours in a kind of can’t-be-bothered-getting-out-of-bed-today kind of way, and then slumps behind a rocky hill around 2.30pm: four and a half hours when we can actually see the sun – if it’s a clear day.

They said it would be windy and it was. Technically speaking the storm that hit us on 8th December wasn’t a hurricane – that name only applies to the mega-depressions that blossom in the mid-Atlantic – but the winds were hurricane force. Here are some exciting stats for you: highest recorded windspeed was 165mph on Cairngorm summit. At lower levels the strongest gust was 105mph at Tulloch Bridge and in my garden my anemometer peaked at 73mph. This might sound a paltry figure compared to the other two but bear in mind my garden is on a sheltered bay in Loch Nevis and 73mph is still hurricane force (just).

I watched BBC Autumnwatch’s report on the annual deer cull last night. Liz Bonin gave an excellent insight into this – as they put it – “controversial” subject.  The use of this word was my only gripe with the BBC’s approach.

I used to get asked this question a lot when I was one of the Knoydart rangers. The truth is, it isn’t usually snowy as it is today. A typical winter involves weeks of rain, gales and grey mist. In a word, winter is “dreich”.