Nobody had seen anything like this before. For two days the thermometer had been steadily falling. The temperature in our valley was more the kind found in the frozen wastes of Siberia. The hills, which would normally be green and purple with heather in the Autumn sunshine were now covered with a thick coating of snow. So deep was it that there had been reports  that a steady stream of our local deer had been seen streaming down the lower slopes in long brown lines in their search for food. We drove up to the shores of the loch and instead of a flat sea of ice we were astonished to find that it had almost completely either evaporated or simply vanished into the earth. Only a few marshy pools surrounded the mass of weed that would normally act as food for the fish, visiting Northern geese and our own dabbling…