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The Scotland Outdoors podcast from BBC Radio Scotland with Mark Stephen and Helen Needham. Hello and thanks very much for choosing to listen to this podcast.

I'm Mark Stephen.

In this edition, Helen Needham and I are in the great Glen visiting an old friend and colleague, Penny Latin. Penny used to be a BBC programme maker, a very good one,

but in January 2020 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and went on to have a mastectomy.

This coincided with her and her family moving to a particularly beautiful part of Scotland.

Now the cancer treatment, the surgery,

was predictably rough. But Penny said she was amazed at how much she found the landscape,

things like birds and animals, even the wildflowers surrounding her home, to be really

helpful with her recovery. Now we thought that was an interesting idea,

nature as healer or co-healer,

and we asked if we could come and talk to her about it.

Almost inevitably, our chat began with all of us

climbing up a hill above Loch Ness.

This is a mixture sort matcha sort of day.

Where we're standing, you can hear all the birdsong and the sun is shining and there's huge

amounts of gorse. I mean, great, billowing explosions of yellow blossoms. Fantastic.

But further down the Loch, Loch Ness, it's snowing, which is just washing out all of the

colour.

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