Siren Song

I’d read about this tree while planning the trip and made a point of building an evening around it. It’s a spindly oak growing straight out of the stones at the waterline on the east shore of Loch Lomond, and it’s photographed often enough that I had a fair idea what I was walking into. What I hadn’t expected was how slight it looks when you’re standing next to it. The roots and limbs are thin and knotted and don’t look up to much, and yet it has held that exposed piece of shoreline in a country whose weather can rage with the best of ’em.

The name comes from the way a tree like that pulls people across a country to stand in front of it at sunset. There’s a lot of folklore attached to the Scottish lochs and I’ve never had any trouble understanding where it came from, least of all on that shore with the light going.

There was enough wind coming across the water to break the surface up, so I fitted a three-stop ND and ran the exposure out to a second, which settled the loch enough that you can see the roots properly instead of losing them in chop.

One other photographer was working the bay while we were there. He’d driven up from Glasgow straight after work for the same light, and we stood and talked through most of it. The camaraderie of the moment is a common thing in landscape photography.

Same Trossachs stretch as The Leap, a few evenings apart.