water, water, everywhere

Lochs — and the opportunities they provide for walking through all seasons of the year — are certainly one of the best things about living here in the west of Scotland. We have recently been exploring more of our local lochs due in part to a on-off obsession of mine with tracing the provenance and history of Glasgow’s water supply. I find that visitors often look at a landscape such as the one which surrounds us here and think of it as “wild”, because it is wet and rocky, and because there are few houses or roads, livestock or crops. But lochside landscapes — like the vast majority of landscapes in Scotland in fact — are not wild at all. For more than a century and a half, the lochs of this area have been shaped by the human management of the water that fills them. Flowing from mountain top to reservoir, and on to domestic pipelines, this loch-filled landscape provides clean, fresh drinking water for the cities of the central belt. There are many facets to my loch / water-supply obsession and I feel I’ll have more to say about it another time, but for now here are some photographs of our local lochs that Tom has taken over the past couple of weeks. These are perhaps picturesque images, but the landscapes they depict are emphatically not wild but, in so many different respects, managed.

Loch Lomond

Loch Achray

Loch Ard

Loch Katrine

Loch Arklet

Loch Lomond (again!)

. . . and again!

And here’s a final lochside photo for those of you who enjoy seeing Bruce from time to time. Tom took this picture on a 30 second exposure – and a ghost dog with a wagging tail managed to photobomb the image.

I know a few of you have expressed interest in prints of Tom’s photography: we are currently setting up a site for this purpose which should go live very soon!