Completing Islay's gridsquares
To anyone who is as much an anorak as I am about grid squares, more specifically Scottish grid squares and, to be even more precise, Scottish island grid squares – OK, Islay’s 743 – you may have noticed I submitted my final photograph for the island (NR2971) on Monday 28th March 2016.
OK, I doubt anyone has noticed. No-one except me and my nine faithful followers had even an incline of knowledge that Thursday 24th March 2016 was a significant Geograph day for me.
I started submitting photographs to Geograph in 2010 on a walk in a remote part of the island
and somewhere along the way decided I’d do all the Islay ones – easy as that’s where I lived – or so I thought. I counted them up – 743 accessible ones (I just know someone is going to go and count them and prove me wrong)! When I say ‘accessible’, I mean accessible by foot. I qualified my quest after realising how difficult it was to access the islets off Islay’s shores, although I have done most of them too.
I planned walks which covered as many gridsquares as possible and got annoyed if a circular walk left just one unphotographed square in the middle of nowhere. Much of Islay is difficult terrain; there are very few footpaths and it is nearly always boggy underfoot with hidden holes, annoying fences, thick vegetation and sudden coastal inlets making walking very difficult. Friends joined me and didn’t moan too much when I suggested venturing just a wee bit further north/south/east/west in order to get into a gridsquare. “But we’re not going that way, Becky,” they protested. Once I left friends at a beach whilst I wandered on for the sake of a northerly grid square.
When I returned they were all watching an otter.
Another time I hopped across tussocks in a blizzard whilst my friends groaned and carried on, heads down; they the sensible ones and me getting wet and miserable, all for the sake of a photograph
Some good friends took me on a boat trip to get to Nave Island, made up of four grid squares and I managed to get all four on that occasion, as well as a host of squares which were more easily accessible by boat.
I was also privileged to get to Orsay Island
and Texa island and get all the squares on two separate occasions.
Of course I wanted a full Geograph stamp for each photograph and so, unsatisfied with supplementary status, I had to revisit some squares which I’d only photographed from afar in my pre-serious days.
and
I was always particularly excited when I got a first for a square or a Tpoint. Of course that was more likely to happen with squares such as NR3754
or NR4159
which are pretty featureless and bang in the middle of nowhere.
Now, in the name of all things anorak and purely because I’ve left the best place in the world behind and want to pay tribute to it, here are my ten favourite Islay gridsquares, in no particular order:
NR3671 - 
NR2362 - 
NR2170 - 
NR4178 - 
NR3877 - 
NR3974 - 
NR4362 - 
NR4658 - 
NR2845 - 
NR4256 - 
- When
- Fri, 1 Apr 2016 at 19:13
- Grid Square
NR2971
blog comments powered by Disqus
