Dunnet Forest

So we woke up to another beautiful warm (yes warm 🌞) and sunny morning! Hang on…pinch yourself…yes we are still in Scotland, and it is end of October, but Tubbs dressed in shorts and t-shirt 🤦🏻‍♂️!! Although we planned to head towards Durness, given the weather we thought let’s hang around here a bit longer and take advantage of this Scottish heat wave (the forecast wasn’t looking too dry for the next few days - monsoon like!!!).  

Just across the road from the camp site was Dunnet Forest which was a woodland but an experimental one. Basically ‘silviculture’ growing of trees and the experiment aspect, growing them on poor soil to see how they grew. They grow pretty well by all accounts! It was a cool area to walk the dogs and just chill with no noise (if a tree falls in a forest, and there’s nobody around, does it make a noise…for sure!) and soak up the positive vibe about this place. A lot of people have spent many hours on cultivating this woodland / forest, it has marked trails (walking or MTB) and some interesting sculptures, a log cabin with benches and in another area a giant wooden xylophone, that sold it to me for sure!  When we found the large wooden xylophone, I tried to play “Happy Birthday” -  this was the first song that came to mind,  obviously because we are singing it to ourselves all the time at the moment when washing our hands 😆

As you have most probably learnt by now Master Wicket loves to sniff everything, especially rabbit and sheep poo (which there is a load of it in Scotland), and occasionally he will try to eat it 🤢. Well today he went one better folks and managed to walk through another dogs 💩 !! A big sloppy one too - apologies if you are eating whilst reading this.  A rather big pet hate of ours is that so many owners don’t pick up after their dogs, but I won’t rant and get into that here.  Needless to say we then spent the next 10 minutes trying to get him to walk through some puddles to wash his paws!  

Anyway we enjoyed the rest of our gorgeous woodland walk and as we made our way back to the van we thought we would have one more play on the beach before leaving the rather lovely Dunnet Bay, plus we thought a run around in the sea and on the sand might help get rid of any nasties Wicket might still have in his paws.  We then had an ideal opportunity to try out the outside shower at the back of the van and I’m pleased to say it worked very well and the water was lovely and warm for him 🐶🚿

So after a lovely morning we started our drive towards Durness…

Lots of love T&TA 😘