Forest Elements

We recently took an afternoon walk around Loch an Eilein in Rothiemurchus Forest.  This is a very scenic walk, but on this occasion the light wasn't good for landscape photographs.  There was still plenty to catch the eye in the smaller, more intimate details of the forest

A birch leaf is lit by a shaft of light hitting the lichen encrusted granite boulder it had fallen onto.  The Caledonian Pinewood is interspersed with Birch, Juniper, Holly, Rowan and Aspen.  It is so much more than simply a Pinewood.  Some of the Birches are very old, and this leaf had fallen from just such a tree. 

A blink of late afternoon sun brought out the rich colour in the bark of this Scots Pine.  This tree was a "Granny Pine", and at a guess was well over 200 years old -the bark was several centimetres thick on a huge trunk.

In a place like Loch an Eilein, it's easy to stare at the loch with the famous island castle, or the surrounding Cairngorm hills - but sometimes it's good to look at the small details.