Winter in the Lammermuir Hills

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As anyone living in the UK for the past week the weather has been, to put it mildly, flipping awful!  People in the North of England and up here in parts of Scotland have been flooded out of their homes and others have had their power and other services disrupted.  And not just once in a lot of cases.  

 Luckily for me the only inconvenience has been I haven't been able to venture out with the camera this week and had to cancel the first photographic trip into the Highlands of 2016.  However compared to the thousands of people I mentioned earlier this is absolutely nothing.

 To show how bad the weather has been I was going to go and watch the North Berwick v Murrayfield Wanderers rugby match this afternoon but even this game was called off due to a waterlogged pitch and for rugby to be called off due to the bad weather conditions it has to be really bad.

 Anyway when I was leaving North Berwick I saw the clouds breaking over the Lammermuir Hills so I decided to head out to one of my favourite photographic spots at White Castle, an old Iron Age Hill Fort not far from Garvald in the Lammermuir Hills.  The rain had fallen as snow over the higher ground and the slight dusting of the white stuff was a nice contrast to the dead bracken and heather covering the hill sides.

 I stood on the top of the old earth works of White Castle and took the shot looking up the burn as the weather started to close in as dusk approached.  I grabbed a couple of images, the one at the top of the page looking up the burn and the second, which is looking down the hill towards the Firth of Forth in the far distance.  You can also see the snow line quite clearly on this shot with the field in the middle distance clear of the white stuff.

I used the Fujifilm X-T1 and XF16-55mm f2.8 fitted with a Lee 0.9 ND Grad filter to hold back the bright misty cloud that was starting to envelope the tops of the far hills in the first shot.  The camera was strapped to my Manfrotto MT190 tripod to keep everything steady in the strong wind.

 It was certainly good to get out and get some landscape images in the bag after 7 days of nothing and also to clear the cobwebs away!
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