For a long time it has been a dream to move out of the urban environment and live in the countryside. This dream has been further shaped over the past 10-15 years by our frequent visits to the Highlands of Scotland which I have grown to love, with the abundance of wildlife, amazing scenery and superb photographic opportunities.

The year 2021 has become the year when the the dream started to unfold and become a reality, and today my wife and I have finally moved to the Highlands! Our move has started with securing rented accommodation out in the sticks after selling our home in the south east of England. This has enabled us to be local which we hope will improve the ease of finding a place to buy in the next 3-12 months.

We have been really blessed with the location of our rented property, which is about 10 miles west of Inverness and truly rural (in fact probably a little too rural for our permanent home!). We are situated in quite an elevated location alongside mixed woodland on one side of the house and looking out to mountains in the distance on the other side. We couldn’t have asked for a better place to take up temporary residence.

My photography has very much taken a back seat over the past 12-18 months along with very infrequent blogs both of which I hope will change as we settle here with the opportunities that will arise from such a change of lifestyle. This was brought into focus on the second night after arriving when we had a clear night sky and experienced the benefits of almost zero light pollution.

Inverness is our nearest centre for shops and having travelled the route a few times since being here we have great views out to the Beauly Firth on the journey - the view below (taken with my Panasonic LX7) I plan to revisit for a sunset photo at the right time of year:

Living beside mixed woodland has major benefits in so many ways - wildlife, dog walks, scenery. One of the first activities was to set up the bird feeding stations and squirrel feeders. We have already had visits from red squirrels (although not to the feeding station yet as there is plenty of natural autumn food available) - the photos below were taken through the kitchen window!

The bird feeding stations are frequented by large numbers of coal tits, with visiting blue tits, great tits, long tailed tits, chaffinches, goldfinches, dunnocks, wrens, robins etc. I’m expecting the bird food bill to be significantly higher as we head into winter!

The woodland has its own treats. Being such a damp environment one of the first things I noticed when walking Willow was the abundance of fungi - just a small selection shown here taken with the mobile phone:

Arriving in autumn has meant that we get to see the woodland in its best colours!

Our elevated position up a country lane gives great views over the surrounding countryside especially when the Scottish weather delivers great rainbows. In fact yesterday morning on my early morning bike ride in the dark with Willow, I saw my first ever ‘moon rainbow’. The moon (it was a full moon later that day) was low on the western sky with patchy clear skies whereas it was raining at my location. I looked over to the east to see a perfect full white rainbow arc in the dark. I’ve never seen one before and so wish I had my pocket camera or mobile phone with me! A lesson learnt.

I’ve always enjoyed keeping fit which includes regular runs, and where we live means plenty of opportunities to get out into the woods in most directions. The only challenge being the hills everywhere! A quick way to increase your fitness levels and stamina! My Garmin watch records my efforts and reminds me how hard the runs were!