| The Kintyre Way | |
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Leaving Claonaig ....
I woke at half past seven and scuttled off to make porridge and banana — the routine already establishing itself. My feet were okay; a little minor surgery with sticking plasters to cover and protect two blisters, one on each heel, and they were ready for the track.
We drove to Clachan first, leaving the car there to await our arrival on foot, and then waited for Dean to collect us. I decided, as we stood about, that I rather liked the neat little place. A small straight road, diminutive white-walled houses on one side and a chuckling brook and tree-scattered hill on the other, an enclosed bus-stop beside the brook where it ran below road level in a kind of trench. A little reading later suggested that the hill was Loup Hill, and that its steep sides had been the scene of the last major battle fought in Kintyre, in May 1689, where the local forces of MacDonald of Largie, McAlester of Loup and McNeill of Gallichoille were defeated by government troops. It was hard to reconcile this pleasant scene with the thought that the ground had once run with blood and the sounds of screaming men. I earnestly hoped that our arrival back here later in the day would not be similarly eventful.
Dean arrived and we all climbed aboard. Today's route would take us on our first real traverse of the peninsula, east to west, which Dean and various pieces of literature had been warning us about. The ground we were about to cover was waterlogged enough that drainage work was already scheduled and sections of the route were being moved to avoid the worst of the bog — for the benefit of future walkers, Dean explained. For now, with the Kintyre Way still in its infancy, we were just going to have to get through it.
While Mark and Dean chatted in the front, I learned that Dean, like me, had once lived and worked in Guernsey — and not only that, but in the field of learning disability support, for the same trust, knowing the same people. What a communal place the world reveals itself to be at moments like this: two men from opposite ends of the country, enabled by similar opportunities, converging on a shared experience and then meeting again years later in a taxi on the Kintyre peninsula. I loved Guernsey. It was simply an ace place to live and work, and Dean's saying — whilst presently surrounded by some of the finest scenery in Britain — that he would move back there like a shot, was the greatest compliment he could have paid it. I understood his sentiments precisely.
Dean deposited us back at Claonaig and drove on. I attempted some filming in the car park and immediately had to begin dodging a car that swung in and began circling me like a shark, its driver apparently undecided about whether he wanted to be here at all and, if not, how many circuits he could complete before I lost my temper. The answer was four. He gave up on circuit three and parked at a distance beyond my throwing range. While I was doing all this, Mark was engaged in conversation with a Scottish man in a hat. I couldn't hear much of it from where I was, but *aye* featured frequently on one side of the exchange. It emerged afterwards that the man had kept asking Mark what the local bus times were, despite being told repeatedly that Mark wasn't a local. You'd have thought the hiking gear, the rucksack, and the flat Brummie accent might have provided sufficient clues, but the message took some time to penetrate and Mark eventually had to edge away.
We set off along the B8001, which took us benignly uphill before a left turn onto the B842. The hedgerows were alive with birds, the fields vied for attention with a glinting sea, and Arran stood importantly over it all. I stopped to film the others walking over a stone bridge flanked by ferns and brambles — at which point Jo and Mark, with their characteristic supernatural awareness of when a camera has been turned on, immediately ceased walking and began leaning on the bridge parapet in a casual examination of the unseen brook below. Bod was already around the corner. I waited, swearing silently, until the other two eventually followed, then jogged up the hill to rejoin them. We continued uphill on the road, the view becoming more delightful with each gain in height. I have always had a great fondness for oak trees and enjoyed their company as we were ushered along beneath their knotty branches.
We took a right turn after a while and climbed a narrow track onto a wooded slope where a table and benches offered a place to pause and prepare for the bog. It was a kind day — sunny and quite warm — so I removed the leggings of my walking trousers and revealed to unprepared members of my group legs of an unwholesome, pasty and hirsute character. Maniacal clouds of midges immediately began to partake of me. I liberally sprayed myself with repellent, to such a degree that Bod complained on behalf of the surrounding woodland.
Mark and Jo were reading a sign about the way ahead.
"It says here to allow nine hours for the boggy bit," Mark commented.
"Nine hours?" I responded plaintively, searching his face for any trace of levity. There was none. He just nodded.
Nine hours would bring us off the bog at eight in the evening, with still some walking to do. I became inaudibly concerned.
God and a few sheep ....
As if underlining its intentions, the trail took us heartily uphill immediately and became moist and sloshy within minutes. Bod led, I was just behind him, Jo followed and Mark was the tail. The ground abandoned sloshy and moved quickly into boggy. The turf squelched. It shifted. It glittered with water. I started to have the impression that I was walking on a giant mat of thatched grass lying on the surface of a shallow lake, whole sections moving and sinking as I put my weight on them. I found myself becoming wary of the possibility of a sudden, panicky plunge through the surface vegetation and into sinister and murky depths.
Bod and I negotiated a particularly treacherous piece of sod and stood a few paces off to watch Jo's approach.
"Are you going to warn him?" Bod asked, by way of conversation.
"Nope." We grinned and waited.
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A boggy climb |
"My knee's hurting," he said.
The thick tussocks of grass submerged in the water were turning feet at unpredictable moments, testing ankle and knee joints with a persistence that accumulated surprisingly quickly. The ground was heavy going and Mark was beginning to feel the effects. He started to drop back as the pain from his knee told on him.
We were breathing fairly robustly for much of the time. Our reward for this toil was generous: three or four hundred feet up, moorland rolling away behind us into trees and more distant hills and eventually the spacious dazzle of Kilbrannan Sound. It was beginning to look genuinely wild around us, apart from striding electricity pylons that loped along to our left and over the next rise.
We rested and regrouped. Mark took some time to reach us; it was clear that the knee was giving him real drama. We splashed on and upward. Amidst the bog and the tussocks there were occasional firm bits of trail that surprised your feet into silence. Bod and I found one such stretch together.
"I'm startled at treading on something which doesn't say *squelch*," I told him, and then amended my statement regrettably. "Apart from that frog."
My own knee and ankle joints had, without creating any kind of fuss about it, become sore. The terrain really twisted at you. I was grateful for it nonetheless, admiring the beauty around us. It had become even wilder and we were now completely surrounded by moor, sharing it with a small number of black-faced sheep. Even Bod was moved to comment on it. I agreed happily, but the bleakness of it prompted a thought.
"God only knows what it's like up here in early February," I pondered, as woolly forms languidly marked our progress. "God and a few sheep," I amended.
I don't know why, but that phrase lodged itself in my mind and began to repeat. *God and a few sheep*, walking over the next hillock. *God and a few sheep*, splashing through another puddled thatch. *God and a few sheep*, these rocks are uneven on the feet. It became almost a chant and then faded away without warning, so that I immediately forgot how much it had plagued me.
Climbing (and sometimes swimming) ....
I spent a fair bit of time looking at the ground as we walked — mindful of tripping over an exposed clump of grass — and was pleasantly struck, in doing so, by how lovely heather looks in its natural habitat, rather than, say, desiccated and clutched in the liver-spotted grip of an antique gypsy. I strode by jaunty clumps of mauve and lilac spears thrusting themselves through the green of the grass, hundreds and thousands of such spikes presenting themselves as a floor covering to admire and nod at. Floor-gazing also showed me that there was more wildlife in this streaming landscape than I'd have credited. Frogs I could understand — there probably isn't a more ideal land-based habitat for them. Shrews were a surprise. Bod and I watched one breast-stroke its way out of our path, its little coat beaded with drops of quagmire, unconcerned. It took a deep breath and plunged onwards, achieving an admirable butterfly stroke.
Bod announced, withdrawing from a squinting inspection of his sat-nav, that we had climbed to about seven hundred feet. We waited for the others and took a breather together. My feet were taking a battering and I was pointedly saying nothing about it.
We set off again, all four together, and were halted almost immediately by a trench of water cutting across the track in a challenging manner. I approached first and, after pausing significantly to gauge the best crossing point, announced melodramatically: "Well — here goes!" and launched myself at what appeared to be the most secure ground.
My leg disappeared into green mire up to the knee.
"Oh, no!"
The laughter of one's friends and family can be a humiliating experience. Jo, in particular, seemed afflicted and continued to chortle as I dragged my saturated limb from the water and inspected it. My bare leg had taken on the appearance of the Incredible Hulk's and remained a sickly hue for the rest of the day's walking. I looked gangrenous.
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Fuar Larach |
After ten minutes, Bod and I had walked ahead and stopped to let Jo and Mark catch up — not because they were in trouble, but because they were travelling at a more leisurely pace. I turned the camera on and began filming their approach. My frustration with the filming situation had by now resolved into something close to fatalism, so I wasn't greatly surprised when they both stopped simultaneously, crouched down and began examining something on the ground, discussing it at length as the camera ground on.
The wind was buffeting at this altitude. I projected my voice against it.
"What did you find?"
The stiff breeze was clearly giving Jo problems in the other direction.
"Twenty-to-one," he called back.
"What — did — you — find?"
He replied with mock indignation: "Twenty-to-one!" then told us they'd been watching a frog.
The route now became genuinely testing. Boggy terrain became undulating — little steep mounds and dunes to climb, then ditches awash with emerald water dropping away without warning. We contoured around these rather than testing their depths, which meant jumping and leaping from dune to mound and getting tangled in thick grass. There was no sitting back and watching for mishaps now; we pointed out safe areas the lead walkers had already tested. My ankles sent a fresh demand to pack this nonsense in. My knees seconded the motion.
Jo broke out elevenses of biscuits and we took stock. Three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of uncultivated moorland, pummelled by a bluff wind. Even the pylons had given up the chase. Mark lay down to ease his knee. Bod, as was his wont, studied his map and sat-nav. We moved on and wound our way upward until we reached the zenith of the day's walking at Lochan Fraoich — Heather Lochan — at approximately seven hundred and sixty feet. We stopped because from here, as Bod pointed out, we had simultaneous views of both Arran and Jura I filmed this. Unfortunately, as we discovered later, Mark's video camera was set in a way that reduced every breathtaking vista to either a total white-out or a smudged blur. The resulting footage has me pointing importantly at something resembling a smeary bogey whilst delivering lavish compliments about the fantastic landscape we are passing through..
The Baps of Jura ....
We zipped up layers against the wind at the top. I was grateful to conceal my left leg, which had taken on the appearance of a limb rediscovered in a trench on the Somme. Mark produced a warm top from his rucksack and immediately noticed something.
"The contents of my backpack smell like a museum."
We looked at him.
"My top smells fusty," he insisted, and shoved it under my nose. He was quite right — his clothing had the exact, timeless and slightly mummified aroma of a large city museum. Why, we couldn't begin to explain.
We skirted the small lake and sloshed on. Bod and I unexpectedly found ourselves in the company of two sheep, which took one distressed look at us and cantered off ahead together.
"I don't fancy yours much, mate," I said.
"I quite fancy both of them," Bod replied.
We had seen pine trees ahead and convinced ourselves this would mark the end of the bogginess — trees, Bod reasoned, wouldn't want their roots in water. On the contrary, we entered the Archaglass forest (which bewilderingly means *green field*) and discovered that not only did the pines grow in standing water; they appeared to be reaching their roots eagerly toward it for a good old paddle. We splashed on with something of the shine taken off our positivism.
Bod and I found the driest available ground at the top of a slope and settled for lunch at half past one. Mark and Jo joined us shortly and Mark asked if we could slow the pace a little — we'd been marching on, forgetting that he was managing a bad knee. It was a relief to take the weight off my own sore feet and look around as I gobbled down my lunch. Jo disappeared into the depths of his hoodie as he sat on the ground. He looked like an elf, or a Jedi Knight with a cheese sandwich.
We set off again at quarter to two and my feet, while still sore, had benefited from the rest. The track soon became less boggy, or at least intermittently so. A plateau opened before me as I stopped to film: track going downhill, banks of violet heather everywhere, trees abundant and glossy with life, distant hills adding a sombre note and Jura standing like a clenched fist on the edge of sight.
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On drier ground at last |
"Those are called the Paps of Jura," Mark confirmed.
"Baps?" enquired Jo.
"Paps."
Bod had already stridden off. Jo was pulling on a fleece against the wind.
"Should be called baps," he concluded.
I filmed them walking off in Bod's wake. Mark's voice rang out in fake Scottish: *"Hey, Juh-ra! Thas' a fine pair of paps yer've got on yer!"*
I waited for the inevitable. Sure enough, they stopped halfway along the track and leaned in for a gesture-filled conversation. Walk-away shots wouldn't feel the same without it now.
A hard section of track lined with heather brought us to another small lake, Fuar Larach — *Cold Water* — which I wasn't about to verify personally, and then a stretch of track liberally sprinkled with rocks protruding from the ground like old bones. Mark and Bod fell into the kind of abstract conversation I might usually expect between two patients detained under Section 3 of the Mental Health Act. They appeared to find it necessary to distinguish between heather growing within a fenced area as *domesticated* and heather growing more freely as *wild*. To my mind it was all accidental where the heather ended up and a few metres of rickety boundary fencing made no meaningful difference to its character, but they rattled on about this for considerably longer than the subject justified.
"You do realise we've got to put up with this crap all week?" I murmured to Jo.
We passed a logging site of considerable ugliness — stumps and blighted earth — which ceased suddenly, leaving a fringe of trees swaying at the edge of the ruin. "Those survivors must be crapping themselves, wondering when they're for the chop," said Mark as we walked by.
Then the track took us around the edge of a loch of a beautiful turquoise that stopped me in my tracks. It reminded me of photographs I had seen of New Zealand's vast lakes and I had to film it. Loch Ciaran, it was called — named, apparently, after a sixth-century Irish saint who may have visited the peninsula, and popular now with anglers after the brown trout that inhabit it. It was breathtaking.
Bod, walking on, delivered himself of a theory: his hands were swelling slowly but continuously through each day's walking. By today they felt heavy and less dexterous. He was expecting further progression each day thereafter. By the time we did the twenty-two miles on the final day, he mused, he'd have comedy hands like Brother Lee Love.
A detour to the turkeys ....
To our considerable surprise and disappointment, the track veered abruptly off the solid stony surface we had been ambling along and back onto marshy ground. We were close to Clachan — it had to be close — so what was going on? We gritted our teeth and tackled bog, tussocks and up-and-down humps all over again, my feet now actively painful. I could hear bursts of cursing behind me; somebody wasn't happy. Then a barbed wire fence appeared across our path.
"We're not seriously supposed to negotiate this, are we?" I asked.
"Yes," said Mark, with a face that was set and a little sullen.
We helped each other through as we had on the moors, holding the top strand at its greatest height while others crouched and squirmed through without snagging their packs. It was nonsense, and the trail that followed meandered pointlessly. It had the feel of a route whose architects had realised, when Clachan was already in sight, that they were short of their mileage quota and had handed the final mile's design to someone's three-year-old with a crayon and a map.
The valley we were forced through was, it must be said, genuinely pretty — a tributary stream from Loch Ciaran dashing along its floor. On a fresh morning with a mug of coffee in hand I would have taken it in with a sigh and a little bob of pleasure. As it was, my vehement gaze was fixed only on the angled, tussock-laden slope I had to negotiate. It hurt my ankles.
The relief when we climbed onto a short track and entered deciduous woodland was considerable. We wound our way beneath a canopy of oak, climbed briefly, descended — and met three hundred turkeys.
There is no point re-reading that sentence. I mean it literally. We had stumbled into a farmer's collection of livestock. They smelled, it must be said, fairly unpleasant, but in fairness: if you confined three hundred humans in a limited space of largely mud, provided no means of bathing and invited them to sit in their own excrement for months on end, you could hardly expect them to present well. These birds ponged a little and, even had I been able to make them understand, it would probably not have given them much comfort to know that their present situation was going to be resolved very shortly. Christmas was three months away.
On the bright side, they cheered us up enormously. Several hundred turkeys gobbling in unison is an unexpectedly effective cure for a foul mood after a day of toil. "Altogether now!" invited Mark, and they obliged to a bird — crowding to their side of the fence and giving voice, associating us with food. Ironic, given what was in store for them. We walked around their compound and they followed, some taking briefly to the air in their eagerness to be near us.
We left them behind and hit proper tarmac road for the first time in hours, which carried us swiftly back to Clachan.
Seafood roulette ....
Done. There was a little moaning about that unnecessary last mile as we took our boots off and ventilated throbbing feet. I hadn't developed any new blisters but had riled up the existing ones considerably. Mark and Bod were mysteriously wet and admitted to having fallen into bog on the final section — surviving the main moorland unscathed only to take the plunge on the home straight. Mark was sure he had new blisters, and impressive ones. Jo had retired to the bus-stop shelter. He was fine.
"That last bit was created by committee," grumbled Bod, peeling off gaiters swathed in muck. They looked as if they'd been modelled by a hippopotamus for several days. But we were done, and it was only four in the afternoon. Two days down, four to go.
We limped home — I discovered that leg muscles which have been working hard will tighten up remarkably quickly once asked to stop — and I used the laundry room to rid my walking clothes of several pounds of crud and an undertone of fusty perspiration.
Dinner was to be cooked in, with Mark and Bod on kitchen duty. It was now that we discovered the prawns.
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Muasdale sunset |
The shop owner must have been delighted. He'd probably phoned his wife immediately.
"Hey — Morag! D'ye ken those packets o' pranns that we won in the tombola las' Hogmanay? The ones we fergot aboot and left in the conservatrry fer a week? Aye, well ye'd never guess! Those four Sassenachs I told ye had arrived — they've only gone and bought the lot! Aye, paid money fer' em! Aye, ah know! Och, ne'er mind autopsies, I'm chuffed tae bits — I'm lockin' up fer the day an' comin' home before the silly buggers bring 'em back!!"
We discussed whether to eat them anyway. I had vivid images of attempting tomorrow's walking doubled over and emitting helpless grunts as my bowels shuddered in the grip of violent peristaltic activity. Or of having to lever my exposed buttocks over a virginal brook and vent ingredients of Chernobyl-like potency. In the end we took the risk and cooked them in a curry. Jo, being vegetarian, offered us a look of deep sadness and sympathy. I ate in the manner of someone who has been sat down to a plate of live scorpions, which was not entirely inaccurate as there may well have been a sting in store later.
After dinner, Mark showed me his heel. I'll admit I was impressed with his blister-producing prowess. He had a real beauty there — so busty and gravity-defying that I was briefly suspicious he'd had an implant. No wonder the poor sod had been limping.
I phoned Mum and Dad to assure them we had made it to Scotland okay and hadn't expired on a remote hilltop or been gored by a bull. We drank beers and Mark and I also partook of the single malt we'd rewarded ourselves with.
Bod had seen seals. They had been out on the rocks in full view of the lounge window and I had missed them entirely. Full of vexation, I watched a totally glorious sunset instead — a fiesta of rich oranges and fiery reds underlined with bruised purple. Rather fantastic, in all honesty. We drank a little more and laughed at episodes of Fawlty Towers on video, but tiredness drew us one by one to bed. I pulled out the sofa bed, wrote a few notes from the day, and felt my eyelids drooping before I'd done more than a paragraph.
I don't remember falling asleep. It was just: wham, lights out.
See Route on ......
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