A Week in Skipness in July...

[rhythmaning]

A week on the west coast; and, at the same time, the east coast: Scotland’s west coast is so convoluted, so twisted that whilst we were on the west coast of Scotland, we were on the east coast of Kintyre, overlooking the hills of Arran to the south.

We had taken a cottage for a week in Skipness, next to the castle. My wife wanted to paint – we hadn’t been there a day when she was saying we had to come back in the autumn so she could paint the views then too. (We did; she didn’t.)

I hired a car - and what I got was a tank: a large four-wheel drive, diesel powered thing; it was good to sit higher than everyone else, but it was so not me: it was far bigger than we needed, and it just felt odd.

On the way down, we stopped off at the Loch Fyne Oyster Bar for lunch – this is what we now do (it is tradition – late lunch a couple of hours out of Edinburgh before we head south to Kintyre) – and very good it was too; even though I was driving, I had a glass of wine (and my wife had two) to was down whatever fish it was I ate.

We ate a lot of fish over the next week: the Skipness Seafood Cabin was quite literally on our doorstop, and we ate there most days; we practically overdosed on fish – which was great: lots of salmon, mussels, oysters (uh huh); and wine. And beer.

We were staying beside the castle, an old norman keep, in Dairy Cottage.

We did nothing on Sunday: just a stroll a long the beach – a pebble beach overlooking Arran. ( We intended to visit Arran – I have never been there – and there was a ferry that leaves from Claonaig, a couple of miles from Skipness. It didn’t happen on this trip; maybe sometime.) The beach is lovely – full of sculptured stones and washed-up wood. My wife found a shelter to paint in, beside a small fishing boat.




Generally, the weather was great – I mean really good; too good. But on the Monday, it was damp and drizzly. I left my wife painting – she was so excited by the views and the sea and the sky (you can see her Skipness paintings here) – and drove to Kilmartin.

Kilmartin is rather special. I had been there before, stopping off on the way to Oban (well, Mull – via Oban!), but we only looked in on the church. The rest of the stuff passed me by.

And what stuff there is: several stone circles, and a whole series of chambered burial cairns. The whole glen is full of neolithic and early christian artefacts. There is a very good museum there (with an interesting charging policy: your ticket lasts a year, so you can go back whenever you feel like it). I left the car at Kilmartin and walked back to the stone circles, looking at the string of cairns along the way.

The stones were wonderful. There is something about standing stones – their age, the way time has past them by. And the way cows and sheep just ignore them (getting on with the important things; like eating grass).



The good weather returned on Tuesday, with a vengeance. I decided to walk from Tarbert to Skipness: part of the new Kintyre trail, a long distance path from Tarbert to the Mull of Kintyre. (Yes, that Mull of Kintyre.) I walked into the village, bought an ice cream and waited for the daily bus; I was the only person to get on, although three people got on at Claonaig, where we waited for the ferry to get in. There, a German man and his son piled on – they had loads of kit, spread over several seats – and a late-middle aged Englishman.

The Germans were going to Cambeltown, and they didn’t seem to get the archaic transport system that operates in rural Scotland: the bus from Tarbert to Cambeltown wouldn’t be for another five hours or so. They ummed and ahhed, unsure what to do, whilst the bus sped along the signle track road to the west coast of Kintyre.

The Englishman got out at Kennacraig, for the ferry to Islay; the bus driver phoned ahead and asked the CalMac staff to hold the ferry for him, since the bus was a little late. The guys from CalMac seemed more than happy to do this – since they wanted to drop something off for the bus to take to Tarbert. The Germans got out at the main road by Kennacraig, hoping to hitch south. (It is a busy road, so I am sure they made it; though they did have a lot of stuff with them!) I was the only person on the bus for the rest of the ride into Tarbert.

The bus was clearly a public service: he stopped to drop off and pick up packages along the way, even saying he’d post some letters for someone.

I like Tarbert: it is a small fishing port, with brightly painted buildings and a Co-Op. I had to go there first, since I didn’t have any suntan lotion; and this was clearly a day for the factor forty. Then I went to the tourist office to ask where the path started; their instructions were bloody hopeless, and I managed to spend ten minutes wandering around the sea-front before I noticed where I was meant to go.



I walked past Tarbert castle, which I had never even noticed before, and began the steep climb into the hills. It was hard work, walking straight into the sun all the way. The path started on forestry tracks, zigzagging across the hillside; the views to the north were good, all the way up Loch Fyne towards Cruachan, and over towards Cowal and Bute. There was a heavy heat haze, though, so I didn’t take any photographs – none at all.

I stopped for lunch half way, near the summit of Cruach Doire Leithe. There are actually two hills on the map called Cruach Doire Leithe; they are next to each other. Someone clearly had no imagination.

The path eased off outside the forest, and it became a much more pleasant walk, although the heat was blistering and the sun was blinding. (Hey – I’d forgotten my dark glasses…) It was not a good day for walking: too hot by far. I drank a lot of water. And then some more.

As the height dropped, I could hear the forester cutting the trees towards Skipness. The path followed the river, past a ruined settlement called Glenskible, and then it veered away and joined a track down into the village.

It was twelve miles or so all the way; twelve hot and sweaty miles. I did good time – four hours or so. And I then sat in the sun drinking a bottle of Arran blonde at the Seafood Cabin. Sophie really did very good business out of us!)

Over the next couple of days, I walked by the sea a lot – one day south to Claonaig, the next north for a while – and read. I sat watching gannets dive – always an amazing sight – these dazzling white birds speeding straight down into the sea. Once on Lewis, I sat on the beach by Port of Ness harbour, and watched a large flock of gannets plummeting down – there must have been a school of herring or mackerel there: I sat for about an hour whilst my wife painted, hypnotised by the white darts.

By Skipness, I also saw a seal (though only one), and a diver – probably red throated or black floated – diving just off the shore.



We went into Tarbert for fish and chips (more fish!), which were pretty good – though in this quintessential Scottish fishing village, it was a shock that the fish-fryer was a brummy. We then drove down the west coast road (failing to see any of the neolithic monuments that the OS map says lie along the way) for an evening walk along Machrihanish Beach. This is a beautiful, three-mile long sand beach; we watched the sun go down over the Atlantic. The sky was amazing – the clouds picking up the falling sun. Islay and Jura were silhouette just to the north. It was truly beautiful – an empty beach, the setting sun, and the pink-and-black tinged clouds. Wonderful.





The next day couldn’t have been more different. We had intended going to Arran; but we woke up to solid, thick fog, so we stayed in bed. The fog was beautiful, too, in its own, foggy way: it was impossible to tell the sky from the sea from the land: each was a different shade of grey. Once awake, I obsessively took photograph after photograph, trying to catch the gentle shades of light – the view was like an abstract painting. It was really beautiful – it was almost a pity when the fog started to lift, late in the afternoon.



We ate for the last time at the Seafood Cabin. I had a delicious salmon salad, whilst my wife had oysters. There was a party there who had been visiting the castle; a group of adults with learning difficulties, together with their carers – a whole bunch of people. With them was a storyteller from Kilmartin, Scot AnSgeulaiche (ha! Try pronouncing that – even if you haven’t had a couple of glasses of wine!); dressed in traditional celtic cloth (no, not the hoops, the race), he plucked on a celtic harp as he told the story of the castle, and how the Campbells fought the MacDonalds – long before Glencoe, this was – the enmity clearly goes far back.

I don’t know if it was the oysters – my wife swears not (she reckons she had been fighting some kind of viral stomach bug for weeks) – but in the afternoon, she started throwing up, and kept throwing up – loudly, violently – all evening and all night; we didn’t sleep much. I was worried she’d be too ill to travel, but she decided she would be ok; we stopped in Tarbert to gather supplies in case she did start throwing up in the car (I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with that). By the time we got to Invereray, she need some food, so we again had lunch at the Oyster Bar, before heading east, and back to Edinburgh. Just in time for the start of the Jazz Festival!