Wandering Around Talking To Rainbows

The weather has been doing an odd Indian Summer sort of thing this last week. It's been really quite plesant more like a week in May than the last week of September. With Sunday being frankly gorgeous I set off on the train for Beauly to see its ruined abbey. It was a better day for photography than the one when I went for a roadtrip to Musselborough with my Mum in early August. The weather is weird these days.




As the name implies, Beauly is in fact a rather pretty wee place.

It has a teeny tiny railway station. That there is the shortest railway platform in all of the Great Britain apparently. It used to have a much bigger station - in fact the building in the background of the photo used to be the station building - but it closed in the 60s. There was apparently a big campaign to reopen it so the tiny platform was a compromise and it became a test case for reopening some of the other smaller stations along that part of the line. (The line is shared until just past Dingwall by the Kyle line and the Far North line.) According to wikipedia the ratio of usage per population is unusually high (and led to the re-opening of Conon Bridge's equally tiny station - with its whole extra 20cm of platform!) and having got the train there and back on a Sunday afternoon I can confirm that a surprising number of people got on and off there - see what a decent service can do for your railway usage!

Anyway, back to the priory. It's been in picturesque ruins for centuries.

Picturesque...

Apparently there used to be a bigger and older elm tree in this cemetary which claimed to be one of the oldest in Europe.


Very picturesque, though increasingly ruined. As the scaffolding implies.

Once, it must have been stunning.




This little chapel is mostly intact.



From the outside round the back, the extent of the damage is pretty clear. It's a very fragile site.


An odd thing about the place is that there is a widely advertised 'Riverside Walk', which is very pleasant but for most of the way you can't actually see the river in question. I had to scramble up the embankment at the side of the path to get these photos and, you know, actually see the river.

These flowers were worth the scramble though.

Also, I stumbled across these thistles with their down blowing everywhere in the breeze. I spent ages trying to get a decent photo of it and I'm really pleased with how this one came out.



What I’ve Just Finished Reading
In a move of remarkably good sense I looked at the two books I had out the library, accepted that I wasn't going to read them anytime soon and took them back. Less sensibly I then went for a wander to see if they had anything else I fancied. I came across The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman which I hadn't read yet so that was exciting. It's a book for adults about childhood which gives it quite an interesting perspective. The supernatural mystery is satisfying, though it didn't really stay with me and while I don't think its his best work, that doesn't make it a bad book.

What I’m Reading
Still working on Special Sound by Louis Neibur. It's really very interesting, but very academic so really needs a good sit down and concentrate all your energy on it reading. Not really a pick up and casually read book this one. Which is absolutely fine by me, it just means it goes slowly. Speaking of lighter reading, I also have The Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan on the go too. The author used to be in fandom and I read her LJ for years and years, up through the publishing of this series of books. I read the first chapter as a teaser years and years ago and remember looking forward to it coming out in paperback so I could read the rest and then...never did. But the other day I happened to be giving the teenage fiction section a look over (bad YA fantasy is terrible, but good YA fantasy is better then pretty much anything else out there).

What I’m Reading Next
I have Flesh Wounds by Christopher Brookmyre out the library, its the next in his series of "serious" books and while I find the lack of obvious humour (they still have funny moments, just darker more subtle humour) a little disconcerting they're still just as compelling a read. Annoyingly, I looked up the title of this book to avoid moving and discovered that this is third book of this strand and I haven't read the 2nd one...)

Additionally, as I seem to have developed a habit of writing about the films I watched at the bottom of this meme, last night I went to see Salt for Svanetia which is a 1930 Soviet documentary-cum-propaganda film. It's a silent film but, as part of the Bo'ness Hippodrome's annual silent film festival a band had been commissioned to write a new score for it and tour it round the country. The band are called Moshie's Bagel and they play heavily East-European influenceed folk/klezmer music. It was a really very compelling combination. I went in with little to no knowledge of what was going to happen, it was a silent movie with live musical accompaniment (the BEST way to watch silent film IMO) I was expecting someone on the piano. When I got into the screening and spotted the instruments set up I realised I was in for a treat. (I like a piano accompaniment, don't get me wrong, the first time I saw a Buster Keaton film with Neil Brand at the piano was an education on what silent film scoring could do, but when someone breaks out a double bass you know you're in for something special.)