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Saturday was a bit wet to say the least, but the afternoon started to look a bit better. After the disappointment of only being able to do a bit of the Dyke walk last week , I decided to have a go at another bit of it. Glen Forsa is a very accesible sort of glen - you can get right deep into mountain country quite easily as the road is good. And Ben Talaidh looks neat up ahead. Unfortunately, I didnt have my camera - the good old battered Fuji Finepix lay on my desk getting charged, so all I had was the phone camera.

Right, these things are OK for taking "pix of ur m8s" getting drunk so you can upload them to Bebo, or Youtube usually with some sort of comment like "U 2 R gr8 - luv U hun.... XXXXXXXXX" and other such towering examples of literary expertise.

But for taking photos of landscapes, they tend to show their limitations. OK, they are getting better but most are not great. So this is how the road up Glen Forsa looks with a Nokia 6020:



Not great, but the day was a bit grey anyway. However as an old mate of mine from the North East used to say "its a sair fecht for a hauf loaf, but it's aye better than nae breid!"

Anyway the reason for heading up the glen was to take a look at a land slip up on Beinn nan Lus, which sits on the west side of the glen. The keeper , who I was talking to a week ago told me that heavy rain last summer had washed down a lot of material, leaving what looked like bare rock away up on the hill. Now, certain things get the geologist excited. Things like new quarries, rock falls, landslips - lots of potential for looking at hitherto unseen rocks. This particular slip had exposed a fair bit of rock, but the interesting thing is, it was right in the line of the Ring Dyke. You lot asleep yet? Good.

Right, I needed to get up and have a look at it. I had been up there years ago but not from the Forsa side - great hills, probably seldom visited except by keepers, shepherds and sportsmen.And the views are rather nice as well.

So after a SERIOUSLY tussocky slog, it was clear that the rock exposed in the slide was the Ring dyke. There is a awful lot of loose wet crumbly stuff as well, so its a bit of a challenge. From there it was a quick pull up to the top of Beinn nan Lus, which lies right in the line of the Dyke, so it is easy to find the Dyke rocks. Enough of this blethering. Some more low quality pictures:



This is Beinn Talaidh seen from rocks near the top of the hill.



Here's a view down towards the Glen Forsa Airfield



And this stuff (Compass for scale, about 4" long) is the Loch Ba Ring Dyke Felsite - that strange mixed rock that we saw last week, but this time on the other side of Loch Ba. You can see the way it has swirls of one type of material mixed in with the other which is chemically quite different.

I think I mentioned it last week - this type of "mix intrusion" is very unusual. One of the reasons, and there are actually several, that the Scottish west coast , and Mull in particular have been hugely important in the development of the science of geology.

So that was that. Should have been up there last Saturday about 4pm. Only a week late! Next time I go up there it will be in good weather and with a proper camera - the views are great and in the right conditions it would be really nice.

Be back soon!

MM