Road Trips...

give endless opportunities for photographs.  Well, okay, road trip is a bit of an exaggeration these days.  We went to visit a friend of mine from Uni, a couple of days ago, who was staying with a friend in a tiny village near Arbroath.  We paused at one point, pretty much in the middle of nowhere...

The further north you get, the closer the hills become, until you're travelling through them, rather than viewing them from a distance.  And finally, we got to our destination.  The lady my friend was staying with lives on a cliff top overlooking the ocean...what a wonderful view...

I was intrigued by the ruins in the water, the remains of a harbour.  Fishing in this part of the world is not what it was, and there is but a cluster of homes on the hill and these remains to remind us of it.

The actual garden has a profusion of flowers, somewhat unstructured, a true cottage garden.

I caught this marigold on the way out; useful flowers, marigolds, culinary as well as beautiful.  They are good in salads, but also have a medicinal use; see here for more detail.  They are relentlessly cheerful flowers. 

So...your eye candy for the day.  Will I use these in the work?  I doubt it, though they will doubtless influence my thinking at some level, as beauty always does.  The shape of that decaying harbour, though, might well appear in something at some point... I'm always interested by structures that are tumbledown.  We'll all have to wait and see.