Dad and I were out and about last weekend, glorious golden winter sunlight, sun low, low, low in the skies now (sunset is now well before 4pm as we move into winter, and the longest night/shortest day is still weeks away). From the top of the Tak Me Doon Road between the Carron Valley and Kilsyth we got these views looking down, the last of the sunlight warming high ground on one side, the other in shadows because of the low sun, the temperature differential creating beautiful, soft, ephemeral mists, but not actually at ground level, hovering a bit higher up, like a blanket of light mist draped over the valley below:

I couldn’t resist this – seen in the last half hour or so of the short daylight, this bare, winter tree silhouetted against the mist, which was turning this beautiful warm copper colour as the sun rapidly declined in the east:

A little earlier we had been round the back of the Campsie Hills and past the Carron Valley reservoir – again the mist rising in the gap between weak winter sunlight on one side and shadows on the other, and again hovering not at ground (or in this case water) level but several feet above it. Utterly gorgeous to take in; while I’m glad some photos came out I’ve got to say they don’t really do justice to how it looked to the naked eye. To say nothing of the feel of it – peaceful, very, very quiet, hardly any other cars passing on the rural road, no town noises, no wind that day, only the sound from some waterfowl, the amber winter sunlight, the long, long shadows and that soft silence, the world screened out by the hills around us:

And one last one, from earlier in the afternoon, from the top of the Crow Road on the Campsie Hills, looking west down into the valley below – all this just a short car ride from the busiest city in Scotland…