Legal
Terms of use
Field notes, not a guide to be followed into the ground: what a reader may take from this journal and what remains their own judgement.
These terms are short because the site is simple. Reading it costs nothing, requires no account and creates no contract beyond the ordinary one: the desk publishes in good faith, and the reader uses what is published with their own judgement.
What the entries are
Every entry is a written summary of the published record of the organisations named on the page, consulted on the date given there, together with the desk’s own reasoning about what that record means for someone standing on a headland. The entries are not the work of those organisations, are not endorsed by them, and should not be quoted as if they were. Where a fact matters, the reader is expected to follow the source, which is named for that purpose.
What they are not
They are not a guarantee of anything. No page of this journal promises that an animal will be seen at a place, in a month or in a sea state, and the Hebridean Whale Trail’s own warning applies throughout: these are wild creatures and can be frustratingly elusive. They are not safety instructions either. Cliff edges, wet rock, wind, cold and the length of a walk back are the reader’s own responsibility, and a sentence on a page about the ground at a site does not replace looking at it.
Access and the law
Access to the coast in Scotland is exercised under Scottish access rights and the Scottish Outdoor Access Code, which the Hebridean Whale Trail asks its visitors to follow: keep to paths near houses and crofts, keep dogs under close control, leave gates as they were found. Separately, it is an offence to deliberately or recklessly disturb any dolphin, porpoise or whale. Nothing on this site should be read as encouraging an approach to an animal, on land or in the water.
Copying and quoting
The text of this journal may be quoted in short extracts with a link to the page it came from. Wholesale copying of an entry is not permitted. The illustrations are made for this journal and are not photographs; they may not be reused as if they documented a real animal or a real site, because they do not. Where an entry quotes a source, the words belong to that source and its own terms apply. The pages on %% describe how those sources are handled.
Changes and questions
These terms may be revised; the date at the top of the page is the date of the version in force. Questions about them go to the desk at the address on the contact page, and the %% describes what the desk keeps of such a message. Nothing on this site sells, books or prices anything, and no term here should be read as if it did.