Picture perfect

We felt this scene looked rather like the subject for a Constable painting, with the black beasts lying disported in  a picturesque fashion on the muddy banks of what is really just a drainage ditch from the fields to the sea but took on a more comely aspect in its blue reflections of the perfect sky. (And I feel I'm writing a somewhat nineteenth century prose here - must be the sun ...)

Behind me as I take this is the sea between the Toward shore and the island of Bute; the hills of Arran are blue and sharp and the sun is striking fiercely off the water. The sun is hot, but the wind is cool and quite brisk till we walk into the shelter of the curve at the end of the Ardyne road. There are dogs everywhere - chasing balls, running madly into the shallow low-tide sea, pulling at their leads - and we realise why it is that we don't tend to walk here in such good weather.

My extra - can't resist - is a wonderful drift of native bluebells along the old wall to the Castle Toward estate. My own garden is full of bluebells just now, but they're the Spanish kind, and their colour is much less intense.