A day out and a walk down memory lane

Yesterday the Open Book was closed. So me and the husband set off to do a bit of exploring. And the sun came out which was a welcome bonus. We’d had a lovely meal at the Bayview bistro here in Wigtown on Saturday evening, so we were really needing a good walk.

In the morning we went to the Wigtown Nature Reserve. Wigtown bay includes the estuaries of the rivers Cree and Bladnoch and as such is home to all sorts of wildlife. We walked along past the marshes where we saw lots of waders, ducks and geese. We spent some time in the bird-watching hide. Unfortunately our binoculars are at home in Skye so this made identification of the birds spotted rather difficult. However we were fascinated to see an ever growing flock of some sort of bird swooping and gathering and flying on, in the way starlings do (we’re fairly sure these weren’t starlings) before finally settling far out on the marsh.

In the afternoon, it was memory lane time. We drove the thirty or so miles to the town of Dalbeattie, to the place we had a happy family holiday nearly thirty years ago when our children were very small. This led to much reflection for both of us on where all the years have gone. Our grandchildren are now nearly the same age as our children were on that holiday. As we were city dwellers at the time, and the holiday cottage was on a farm, it was the first time the children had seen cows close up. They loved that if you stood at the kitchen window and made mooing noises, then the cows gathered at the fence and mooed back.

From Dalbeattie we moved on to Rockcliffe, a very pretty coastal village with a small rocky beach. The tide was  out so we could explore rock pools as we scrambled over rocks and made our way along the bay.

All in all it was a most enjoyable day, topped off by a lovely curry made by the husband when we returned to the flat.