some awe

The Scottish trip ended in England, or in border territories at least. Getting from Oban to Naworth, near Carlisle, was another journey of visual excess. By then, I was on a deadline, so couldn't stop much. It would otherwise have taken me several days. But Loch Awe demanded its name in attention. Ruins and bridges have special attractions in their look. Perhaps they fulfil similar functions, one in time, the other in place. In the right setting, there is a romance in both which allows man an un-arrogant place.

When an obviously-large structure looks small in its setting, we stop and look harder. If what we see says that nature's bigger than man, we nod wisely, and move on. Perhaps that's why I like pylons: standing next to one, it feels huge, dominant; but looking at its neighbour, and then the neighbour's neighbour, and so on, it becomes charmingly insignificant.  

On Loch Awe, every man-made structure looks charmingly insignificant. 

The bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond are as described. I was driving along one of those banks, and thinking that there should be something like a pit-stop, a place which had parking spots pointed at the view from a side road, so that the casual tourist could stop at whim and take in the view.

I pulled into a lay-by (of which there is an admirable culture in Scotland) and found precisely the thing I had been imagining. No fanfare, no explanation, but a viewing system designed for the car user and the view. Bulging blackberries nourished my self-indulgent picture making.  I was trying to take at least five different pictures in the time I was there. The result was that none of them were particularly good, even the three-stripes that I'd been making for the whole week.

An irritating question poked its head up, yet again. Why do I find all this so beautiful? If there's an answer to such a foolish question, it often seems to be about scale. The water and the sky conspire to make the mountains looks small, and suddenly a drama is happening. The element of drama that is lost in most still pictures is the movement, both of the clouds and the water, and even the trees in between. All those movements are slightly different. The great landscape artist - painter, photographer, writer, or composer - can capture that difference in movement and freeze it into a still but vibrant description. I'm still searching for that.