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Thursday 31st Mar 2005
Today was Kirriemuir day. M**** wanted to check out J M Barrie things, Kirriemuir being the place he was born, raised or something. God knows. The picture (taken at 14:24) of the wooden hut is a camera obscura, paid for J M Barrie and built on some cricket grounds that he would often frequent.
The universal joint was broken in the mechanism to rotate the mirror, so the image was fixed. Also, on account of the weather, there wasn't much to see anyway. Still, the two men running the obscura were very friendly and also apologetic about the weather and broken-ness of it all, so let us check out the obscura for free. I had never seen a camera obscura before, so it was all new stuff for me. Effectively a huge camera, of course. Anyway, that's the gravestone to the left there. M**** took this one at 14:28. And, as I sit here, writing this, I kind of had a feeling that the date of my birthday would be somewhere there, and there it is. Maybe it registered subconsciously when we there. Dunno.
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Then, on the way back, we went for a walk up to this Airlie monument that everyone in the guestbook had been going on about. I took a few dull pictures of trees here, this one (first left) taken at 16:54. Before we began our walk, we stopped for lunch, and it was rather disappointing to see bits of rubbish lying around where we ate our lunch. I thought we were in the middle of nowhere, damnit. The other picture (second left) was taken at 17:01. That's M**** there in the distance. In fact, we didn't see another soul throughout this walk.
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So, after about 15/20 minutes of walking (the pictures to the right there were taken at 17:15, 17:19 and 17:21) we began to make out the shape of some kind of structure through the mist. We were ascending and the mist was definitely getting thicker, but I kind of like the effect. It reminds me of something from, erm, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A bit. Yep. So . . . we stopped there momentarily. I really wanted to get in the tower, climb to the top and all, but it was definitely locked, so I comforted myself slightly by taking this picture (third along) of the inside of the tower.
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These ones were taken at (left to right) 19:20, 17:51 and 17:50. After walking back down the hill from Airlie monument, we checked out this, er . . . cairn?! Not sure what you'd call it . . . anyway, it was there to commemorate the occasion of, erm . . . an explorer deciding to explore something . . . Walter Scott? Yeah, that was it. There was once a fountain here, but it was 'accidentally destroyed' some years ago. The cairn was on a sharp bend, so I suspect a tractor came around the corner a trifle too fast. That evening, I think we stayed in for dinner and I played with the fire some more. At some point today, M**** took this 'movie' of the cottage, river and gardens.
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