Enjoy a little slice of the glorious #ScottishHighlands: #CaledonianForest & Plodda Falls
The holiday is over, normal service will soon be resumed…
But I still have a few photos and videos to share – yay! :-)
So here goes: prepare for an enticing dip into beautiful and awesome mother nature – and also a little trip into one of the main locations in DESPRITE MEASURES , the tale of a Caledonian Sprite: PLODDA FALLS.
And if anyone thinks I made that name up – here’s the proof.
As you can see, popular with the visitors.
To get here, you have around 2 miles of beautiful forest to drive through:
On this day, we take the longer path, to approach the falls from the bottom.
In DESPRITE MEASURES, Cassie drives down the track to Wynter’s caravan. On this day, Frodo was having a fine time exploring it.
The trees are huge
There is a house (Plodda Lodge) standing just above where I put Wynter’s van in the novel – isn’t it a gorgeous site?
This video is taken from just below the house – you can clearly see the scar left by recent logging operations :-(
Back into the forest on a level path (also detailed in DESPRITE MEASURES) with Frodo still in the lead
As we walk, the sound of rushing water grows, and eventually we reach the river below the falls:
And then it’s up, up, up …
No, wait a minute, that comes from another book, doesn’t it? Although that one also has a Frodo in it… ;-)
And finally, to the magnificence of the falls
This is the beautiful view from half way up
And here is the amazing experience of walking out onto that viewing platform!
Isn’t that quite something?
As we walk away, we are pleased to find this sign:
But we’re not quite finished yet.
As we leave the magnificence of that plunging tumble of 46m (151 feet), we travel just a little further up, to the upper falls: a pretty cascade that, first time we visited, fooled us into thinking we had arrived at the main falls. If you’ve seen a photo first, you won’t make this mistake, but we hadn’t, and nearly missed going on to the main fall (we discovered the uphill approach on our second visit).
And here we found this amazing (and cute) foam doughnut!
I think you can see quite clearly a point I make in DESPRITE MEASURES: how magical it is that Highland water can be both brown with peat, and yet clear at the same time. And foamy.
And for good measure, a final view as we leave the falls behind us.
Almost done now, for this trip, just one more set of pics to share – hope you are enjoying the second-hand trip?
