In Knoydart today the sun rose at 9am and will set at 3.42pm giving us just six hours, forty-two minutes of daylight. Of course, those times are for when the sun actually rises above the horizon, assuming the horizon is unobstructed. We’ve got lots of hills here in Knoydart so the sun doesn’t actually appear above Beinn Buidhe to the south-east of me until about 10am. It then slouches its way across the southern skyline, lighting up our day for a few hours in a kind of can’t-be-bothered-getting-out-of-bed-today kind of way, and then slumps behind a rocky hill around 2.30pm: four and a half hours when we can actually see the sun – if it’s a clear day.

I hesitated back there to call this “daylight”; right now I’m looking out of the window at a grey sky. Even the limp wet grass is a sickly green and the skeletal branches of the ash trees, caught in the mist, look like wiry ghosts lost in fog. Last year we had snow and blue skies <!–more–> and all was sparkly and white. There’s still plenty of time for snow this winter but I’m getting impatient so I’ve been looking back on some of my photos of Knoydart last year when we had one of the coldest and snowiest winters for a long time. I thought I’d share some of my favourites to mark the winter solstice.

So forget for a moment the stress of Christmas shopping in out-of-town retail parks, leaning on the steering wheel staring at brake lights in yuletide traffic jams and worrying about how to pay off your credit card bill in the new year and think instead of crunching through the snow, hoar frost twinkling on the birch trees, stamping the snow off your boots at the end of the day and enjoying a large glass of mulled wine by a roaring log fire. And if the reality is dampness, darkness and rain console yourself in the knowledge that today is the winter solstice and from now on we get a little bit of extra daylight every day (and there’s still time for some proper snow to come our way).

Postscipt: I’ve just done a bit of research into the winter solstice and discovered that the precise moment of the winter solstice – when the sun is at its lowest point in the sky – varies from year to year. This year it happens at 5.30am on the 22nd – so I’m a whole day early with this spiel about the days getting longer. Sorry folks, but we still have until 5.30am tomorrow before the sun starts to climb higher into the sky. Bah-Humbug.