carrots

What a super lunch we had on New Years Day, thanks to my clever, lovely wife. A very rich steak pie was joined by some rather special veggies, winter greens (what is that? didn't exist when I was wee) and a very tasty, garlicky carrot puree. There was lots of the carrot puree and we finished it off over the next couple of meals. Are carrots really good for night vision? This afternoon I wondered about carrot consequences.

I wasn't enjoying a day of Access students' UCAS applications. By late afternoon I needed air. It's only 15 minutes in the car out into the forest and moors beyond Eaglesham so off I popped.

It was 16.00 when I left the car. On 3 January, in Glasgow, the Sun sets at 15.57. Most of the Eaglesham Moor (now thought of by many as Whitelee Windfarm) was blanketed in mist, or rather low cloud. No sun-drenched walk awaited.

From the car I headed off along the track through the forest, that will take you to the top of Myres Hill. There were windmills there long before the now-huge windfarm got going, first a variety of experimental designs owned (I think) by the National Engineering Laboratory, then a couple of bigger, 1 MW NEG Micon turbines. A couple of years ago this track went only to Myres Hill. With the expansion of the Whitelee Windfarm there are other options and I took one of these.

It was dull as I set out, as you can see at the left, and it got duller. I followed a track that led up to the east end of the windfarm proper.

The photos were taken with the camera on my phone (HTC Desire C if you care about such things). I was sort of interested that I could take photos at all. I expected useful light to disappear very quickly, inside the cloud with the Sun below the horizon. But photos continued to be possible (if dull).

Every so often my ears told me I was passing close to a turbine, in particular as I came to the end of the forest. The Whitelee turbines are 110 m tall. One of them obviously lurked quite close. Its sound came from well above my head, probably just 10s of metres away but it was completely invisible; a huge, undoubted but rather spooky presence. Very shortly after this I came to a sign that said "Turbine no 103". There was no longer enough light for photos - the attempt shows just blackness. I could clearly see several tracks now, heading off into the windfarm proper. Any further progress would come with a real risk of failing to find the correct way back so I turned round.

For some time I'd been aware of just how isolated I was. Nobody else was near. There are houses round the edges of the Eaglesham Moor but there was almost certainly nobody else in the middle of it, certainly not walking about for "pleasure"; windfarm employees possibly but nowhere near me. I felt special. It was such a pleasure to be there I couldn't understand why more people weren't sharing it.

It was getting darker and darker, an hour now since sunset and inside fairly thick cloud, but I could still see. In particular, I could see the reflections of trees in the boggy ditches at the sides of the road. Where was this light coming from? Was it the remains of the day or the glow of the city? I wondered briefly if all those carrots in the last couple of days had helped (nonsense of course). Wherever it was coming from originally, the light was diffused all through the cloud so that it shone weakly from all over the sky. It struck me that it might actually be slightly brighter, inside the cloud with very dull light coming from all around, than on a nice clear night with light coming only from the direction of the recently set Sun. Probably the answer is known, in some classic book on radiative transfer. Perhaps in a future blog post... (or the comments?).

On the way back I took a different route. I knew that another, different track would take me back to the car more directly, and was familiar enough with those tracks to have no trouble finding it. It's a much older track, however, not maintained, and I hadn't expected it to be so muddy. Although it never actually got so dark I couldn't see, I was grateful that I could use the phone as a torch on a couple of occasions, to negotiate the sections that looked flooded.

The lights of the few houses at the end of the public road were rather a spooky sight through the cloud, but also a reassuring one and I was able to make my way back to the car without any problem beyond rather squelchy feet. The name of this place seemed chosen for this foolish outing: Carrot Farm.