Gold on the hillside

I've never noticed them before. Maybe they've not been there; maybe I've not ever walked this path above Loch Eck at the very end of May. But today the air was full of scent, so that I was aware of their presence before I'd noticed that the bursts of gold on the hillside were not bushes of broom or gorse but were azaleas - the wild ones, to be sure, but giving the whole area the feeling of a garden to match those we marvelled at in Turkey a couple of weeks ago.

I always notice how Loch Eck looks black from above, even on a day of pale blue sky and sunshine. Yellow flowers, the black loch, and two tiny insects: one a moth with geometric black patterns on its white wings, the whole no more than two centimetres wide, and the other a butterfly as pink as the dye on my hair, with a surrounding bar of blue on the underside of its wings.

Magic!