A New Walk

 There are only a limited number of walks on Orkney, all of which appear and re-appear, with the occasional tweak in all the Walking on Orkney books. We're even more limited because even before I took my recent spectacular and painful fall, I had a hearty dislike of struggling over uneven terrain, especially clumpy grass which more often than not hides a layer of stones from a fallen down house. So we tend to do the same old ones over and over. But last week we did a new one.

For  a couple of months one of the options in the Tesco 'support a local charity with your blue token vote' boxes was a group trying to improve the facilities for the walk around St Mary's Loch, which is just outside he village of St Mary which confusingly is more often referred to as Holm village and which, just to put the icing on the cake, is pronounced Ham. Coming home from town recently I saw new lengths of board walk and a new bird hide there so obviously the money had been put to good use and so last week we went over there to try it out. 

It was mostly lovely. We've never waked around St Mary's loch before because really it was just a wet mess with no proper path , but things are much improved. We visited the new bird hide which would have been better had the windows had glass in them rather than being an empty void, open, once you had raised the shutters to let in light, to the wind, but it was clean and new and had a bird book and a white board for writing sightings on. Which appeared mostly to have been bees in the preceding three days. which isn't quite the point, but you know, whatever,..

We carried on past the hide and came across a picnic table and then some recently planted woodland and it was all tickety boo and we were thinking what a great place it would be to bring the grandchildren when they visit later this year and then the path petered out, the ground started to tilt at 45 degrees across where it had been and the lovely walk became a bit of a nightmare. The OH , lovely though he is, is never a help in these situations as he doesn't understand my lack of confidence, but then he's never broken one ankle let alone two. I managed to shuffle back to the road , and it was a bit of a shuffle!, and decided it would still be a lovely place to bring the boys but I would turn back the way we'd come after we'd had tea and biscuits on the picnic table while the others marched on round to complete the circuit. 

I didn't have my camera with me but the OH had his phone and so we have some photos. I can't imagine why I didn't have mine with me now that I can see well enough to take photographs again, but anyway I pointed out a few views that I 'would have taken' and he duly took them for me.