Up close and personal with a train

Whenever we go in or out of the cottage by car, we have to open manual level crossing gates and phone the signal office to find out whether we can cross. As we came back this evening, we got the message that the train had just left Ardgay (3 minutes up the road) and it would only be safe to cross after we had let it go by. A great opportunity to get a blip.

Not that I was short of one before (see extra). We walked down to the shoreline this morning, and got sort of caught by the one shower that came through here (after it was sunny first thing). You can see it swinging through in the haziness of the picture. Afterwards, it brightened up, especially after 1pm when I had finished my tasks for the day and was ready to head out for a walk. We went up to Pulpit Rock on Tain Hill, which made for a perfectly adequate little afternoon potter, and then down to Alness, where we walked around Dalmore House and along the river. Finally, we finished off our trip by having a quick supper at Platform 1864 in Tain, and then popped in to the Lidl, which has just about the best view you could ever imagine from a supermarket carpark, across the Dornoch Firth, for a bottle of wine (purely for the purposes of research, you understand, as we wanted to know what was available up here).

It was a bright and sharp evening as we drove home up the Firth, and the day was topped off by an opportunity to blip a train going through.