This is a blog that I started writing in the summer ‘18 and completely forgot about. So I added some finishing touches and posted it…
We've had lovely weather in Scotland, recently. After the winter (and most of the spring) that we had, it's been a pleasant spell. It doesn't happen very often in Scotland so you need to make the most of it while it's here.
This has resulted in a few day trips around the place. Though thanks to the harsh, overhead sunlight, I haven't been taking too many photos as the situations aren't as nice to look at as they are to visit in those circumstances.
Like the majority of people in Scotland, I live in the central belt. That puts us more or less within 5 hours drive of pretty much anywhere on the main land. So options aren't limited when deciding where to go. We generally go north. The borders are nice but there's something about heading north that I just enjoy.
That leaves the choice of east vs west. I almost always choose west. The west coast is raw. It's mountains, glens and lochs. The east coast is more developed. It's seaside villages and harbours. As someone who prefers to get away from crowds and spend a bit of time with nature, it's an easy choice.
But with the weather being so nice, and the huge crowds not appearing until the school holidays start up, we decided to go up the east coast. The Fife Coastal Route, in fact. When you go up the west coast, you're often not actually at the coast. Sometimes the coast comes in to meet you, though. The ragged outline of the west coast of Scotland often means you can be many miles from the sea, but around the next corner, you'll find a sea loch that stretches 20 plus miles into the mainland. So really anything on the left-ish side of the country gets referred to as the west coast.
The Fife Coastal Route more or less keeps you within sight of the North Sea from start to finish. There are no jutting sea lochs or tangle of peninsulas and islands. In fact, The Neuk (nook) of Fife (the name of the area) is really one big peninsula. So it’s a totally different experience, from a photography point of view.
Anstruther was the target. They have a famously good chip shop and as we had the dog with us, we needed somewhere that we could eat outside.
I have to say that the trip up was a nice change from our usual and was actually quite nostalgic. Some of the places are a bit like stepping back in time. I was particularly excited to see an arcade by the seaside in Leven than we were definitely going to visit another time. It looked like it might have even had sticky carpets (fingers crossed) and their website was also just perfectly 90s, before it was removed. Pamela was ready to call a halt to the rest of the day if they had a ‘Penny Drop’ machine but I managed to convince her to put it off for another day. So it wasn’t mountains and lochs that were getting our attention on this trip. It was more of the human element to things.
That’s not to say that there’s not natural beauty up that direction, though.
Bass Rock from the pier in Anstruther
It’s time for a confession, here. My camera packed in this year. I dunno exactly what happened but one of the issues was that the aperture was stuck wide open. It happened right as I was doing the shows for “Exit Stage Left” so I had to do that with a malfunctioning camera. As soon as their shows had finished, I sent it away to get fixed. Thankfully it was all sorted and the camera was back to its good old self by the time we went away that day. Here’s where I screwed up: I didn’t check the image quality setting when it came back. I’ve photographed in RAW since a few months after I started photography. But Nikon apparently reset the camera when they sorted it. I got everything back the way I wanted it before I took it out but forgot to check the image quality setting. So I photographed everything in JPEG for the first time since early 2014. I was more upset about this than I’d like to admit. Partially because it was such a beginner mistake to make and partially because it meant that I didn’t have the ability to edit the photographs the way I wanted, and I had rather liked some of the photographs that I took that day but the data just wasn’t there to adjust them the way I would normally do. A slap on the wrist to me, then.
We arrived in a packed Anstruther, ate fish and chips (thoroughly deserving of the reputation, by the way) and sat on the beach, enjoying the sun. Haven’t done that in Scotland for a long time. After a while we jumped back into the car started heading home, which is when I saw the scene at the start of the blog. When we reached a car park at the bottom of the hill, you could no longer see the oil rigs. So we headed back up to see if there was somewhere to pull in. There was not. With no where to stop the car, I ended up driving up and down the hill until we found ourselves alone and I could get this photograph out the car window. The life of a photographer!
So to come back to my original, click baity title: Do I prefer the east or west coast? I mean, if for whatever reason I could only ever visit one side of Scotland again, it would be the west side. There’s no arguing there. It’s a spectacular landscape that necessitates a life for those that live there that’s at times like another world to the relatively cosmopolitan Central Belt.
So it’s apples and oranges stuff here. But while the west coast certainly wins on natural beauty, I think that there’s lot more to the east coast than I had previously thought and I’ll definitely be doing more exploring of that side of the country in the future. If I can get Pamela past the Penny Drop, that is.