The hills are an odd mix of bronze and purple, as autumn and summer go head to head in a confusion of delicate decay and plush growth. Heather sweeps in a flush up the slopes, while around it the bracken has already started collapsing, stalks withered and weak.

From January to August last year we had seen a fairly scant 460 total hours of sunlight: this year, at the time of writing, there have been more than 650 sunlit hours since the turn of the year. These August skies have brought almost double the light to Lochaber than the same month last year. Combined with our resident rainfall, the result is a disconcerting hot green summer with more than just a whiff of autumn about it.

Weeks ago, a friend told me she and her son had come across ripe brambles, half a season ahead of their normal fruiting time. I was catching glimpses of rowan berries in July, bright beacons of summer’s end while we were still in the midst of it. Oak trees heading towards a mast year are heavy too with acorns. Or they were, until Storm Floris had its battering go at everything. 

When trees drop their leaves in autumn it is, in part, a defense mechanism against winter winds. Leaves may be small, but in the millions they catch the gusts in volumes enough to wrench even the strongest of branches, tipping trees across roads busy with tourists. One visitor stood in the high street watching the roof peel off a building and asked ‘Is this normal weather for the Highlands then?’. Well, no. And yes.

The adage of ‘four seasons in one day’ feels a little too close to the bone nowadays. The edges of the seasons are shifting, their boundaries blurring.  Where spring took forever to come last year, limping in after a long and dark winter, this year it burst from the landscape. The big oak in front of our house, usually one of the last to leaf, was in its full finery before May was out.  Now, it is peppered with brown curls, and the air around it is too quiet.

Standing at the kitchen window, my son asks what are the flock of small birds he’s just watched fly across the tree tops. Once I would have answered confidently that they might have been swallows or house martins gathering for their migration back south, but I realise now that I haven’t seen any in days.  Instead, a tiny voice in the back of my mind wonders if they might have been fieldfare arrived from the north, months ahead of schedule. Highly unlikely, says the voice of reason, as another dead leaf floats by the window, coppery in the evening sun.