The Leap

Walking through a kissing gate into somebody’s sheep pasture felt wrong to me in a way I doubt it would to a Scot. We aren’t raised with rights of way in the States, and my instinct the whole way down that path was that we were trespassing on a working farm. There was another couple already out there when we arrived, which was oddly reassuring.

The falls were in a travel guide I’d bought for the trip. They come down roughly ninety feet in a run of cascades with nothing around them but grass, sheep and the valley, and this was our first sunset of the Trossachs leg after we came across from Edinburgh. It set a standard for the rest of the trip that the rest of the trip went on to meet.

We were out there about three hours waiting for the light. The best vantage is from the top, looking across the uppermost cascade with the valley winding away toward the hills, so we settled onto a big boulder up there and waited it out. The stone had been in the sun all day and the evening had turned cool, which made three hours pass a good deal more easily than it might have.

The sun ended up sitting right in the frame. Given where I could physically stand and what I wanted in the composition there was no avoiding it, and I’ve come round to what it does.

This was the first sunset of the trip — Bloody Pulpit and Siren Song came later in the same Trossachs stretch.