| The Kintyre Way | |
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A morning full of seals ....
I was shifted from slumber at half past seven and immediately scanned the rocks with my binoculars. They appeared bereft of seals. There were lots of rocks — in fact, rocks seemed to have multiplied overnight — but no seals. This might have been more troubling had my binoculars not appeared to have developed a significant problem since I'd last used them. Looking through them was like looking through the eyes of someone who had recently been severely concussed. It made me a little nauseous. Instead of a crisp, three-dimensional image with depth and clarity, I was seeing three of everything through frosted glass. How my binoculars managed three images with only two lenses I am at a complete loss to explain, as I am also unable to explain how they made everything appear smaller than it was through them. Using them seemed to transport me three-quarters of a mile further inland. I checked whether I was holding them the wrong way around — an error I am entirely capable of — but this wasn't the case. One of the barrels had become askew. I tried to coax it back into alignment. This performance continued for several minutes and began to severely test my patience, and no amount of coaxing, forcing, or finally wrenching made any difference. I eventually employed the highly technical tactic of smacking the thing vigorously against the wall, which did the realignment job perfectly and gave me no further trouble for the rest of the week.
I fixed myself bananridge for breakfast and returned to the lounge to find Jo also peering through binoculars.
"I can see some seals," he said, mildly.
The extra rocks I had noted earlier had tails and whiskers. We watched them for a while. This proved to be a wholly unremarkable experience. I released the breath I discovered I had been holding for the past three minutes and found that my dizziness and pounding head began to lessen immediately.
"They don't do much," I gasped. "I spent ages thinking they were rocks."
I kept returning to them throughout breakfast, because having them on the doorstep was genuinely pleasing regardless of their dynamic limitations. I noticed that they reposed with heads and tails curled into the air simultaneously, so that from a distance they looked like dried-up slugs.
After breakfast I did some maintenance on my feet. Yesterday's plasters had been ground into roll-ups by a day's walking and clung on by one end, so I pulled them off and applied fresh ones. Mark walked by, limping.
"Still sore, then?"
"Still nasty." He showed me to confirm this. It still looked nasty. I wouldn't have liked to walk on it.
"My hip hurts too," he added. I tensed, hoping this wasn't going to be added to the must-see list. "But the funny thing is — my knee is better!" he brightened. Bod reckoned the hip was a consequence of Mark compensating for the knee all day and altering his gait without noticing. It sounded about right.
We left the house at 09:20a.m and drove up to Tayinloan. We were at the stage of the week when the morning drive wasn't a long one from our base at Muasdale. Indeed, tomorrow's walk would take us level with Muasdale, albeit on the other side of the peninsula at Carradale .
The weather today was in a grey and sombre mood and rain was forecast. There was a little confusion as to where we were supposed to meet Dean and we parked on the main road for a short time, before finding a car park. Dean met us there and drove us back to Clachan. A conversation took place about the previous day's walking. You have to be careful — the success of this walk brings money to the area and locals can be protective of criticism — but we did point out that some sections warranted a second look. It was hard to tell whether Dean was offended. He dropped us off, wished us luck, and we went through the usual routine of adjusting gear before setting off. Jo nudged me as we left and pointed. One house had what I initially took to be a telephone box planted absurdly close to its front door, but it turned out to be the porch — designed using a modified version of the old red telephone box we had grown up with in the seventies. An imaginative and rather pleasing solution to the problem of front-door architecture.
The walk began along the A83. We swung out of Clachan and joined it almost immediately. I was feeling optimistic and mentioned to my companions that we might well complete today's walking before the rain arrived. The route was less than nine miles and it looked a little brighter. They all agreed. We had marched fewer than twenty paces further when it started to drizzle.
Cars passed at speed and the noise could be mildly irritating, but there were pleasant views to our right over pasture and towards Dunskeig Bay, and good views of Gigha and the Paps of Jura again. We passed a Goliath of a bull in a field — ebony in colour, rippling with muscle, contemplating us mildly as we walked by. He was like a bovine Frank Bruno.
After a mile or so, Bod pointed out sheep with identification numbers inked on their flanks.
"There must be a concentration camp around here."
"Hmm," I replied. "Hitler's persecution of the ewes."
Mark began singing snatches of very old Genesis songs as we walked past pine woods. We hit a slightly tricky section where we couldn't determine whether the route wanted us on the road or in the soaking ditch of vegetation running parallel to it. We eyed the ditch dubiously and chose the road, and both routes led to the same marker in any case. Two miles along, we reached Ronachan Bay — which means *the place of the seals* — and there, in the middle distance on the inevitable rock, were eight of them going about the demanding business of lying around in blubbery contentment.
grey or common ? I did not know at the time, but some research suggests strongly that these were grey seals; they were larger, they were blotchy (unlike the glowing complexion of their cousins), half the world's population exist around the UK and they tend to hang about on rocks more than the common seal does (which prefers sandy beaches, bless) but what I do know is that they have been lumping about around here for over a thousand years. Not these eight specifically, obviously. It states that otters are seen here frequently too and I would have loved to have seen one of those chaps, but there was lots more wildlife to hold in esteem. I saw my first hooded crows here and admired them; they are quite handsome with that grey-coloured head. I also recognised the haunting call of curlews and spotted them wheeling about over the waves. There was a flock of Oystercatchers flashing by; black and white skimmers with a slim blade of orange for a beak. The one bird I couldn't identify seemed to be a type of grebe which kept going arse-upwards and diving beneath the water to reappear, sometimes a minute later, in a spot metres removed from where they'd submerged. In fact, I've looked it up again and can relatively confidently say that the bird(s) I saw on Kintyre were not grebes at all. They were ducks. A diving duck called red-breasted merganser . I had noticed that it had had a crest and so assumed I was looking at a grebe, but no! These handsome diving ducks belong to the sawbill family, so called because of their long, serrated bills, used for catching fish known to frequent the west coast of Kintyre, and considerably more interesting than their name suggests. Although I am becoming aware that I am beginning to sound like a geek who needs to get a girlfriend and will stop now.
Mark had been rather quiet. He finally admitted that he had left the spare filming tape back at the apartment. We had four minutes of filming time for the entire day. I had told him yesterday that the tape was coming to an end.
The other sort of beach walking ....
So, we began to walk on the beach.
At this point I should explain what I had imagined beach walking to be. There were moments at work — when someone was yelling at me and calling me names — when I would drift off into a small, agreeable reverie in which this section of the walk lay upon soft ochre sands, the sea gentle and whispering, the air pleasantly biting with a mild tang of salt.
This wasn't at all like that.
Beach walking on shale is not idyllic. It isn't even easy. Shale is sly and unwilling to give you secure passage — you are in a constant micro-struggle against its natural tendency to shift and give way, slipping and sliding without ever quite falling. You don't realise how hard you're working until your hip socket develops an ache it has never experienced in its forty years of manoeuvring your leg. The beach was often angled as well, exerting constant outward pressure on my right ankle.
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Slogging along the beach |
Before long this new terrain had introduced a different walking action from my usual one. My new walking action didn't fit my clothes, and I very quickly developed a chafe-mark on an indecent area of my inner thigh. It was quite sore and felt rather like a burn, which in a sense is what it was.
The rain persisted in spitting down, but visibility out to sea was open and satisfying, Gigha standing chest-deep in water as it has for probably millions of years. When it began to rain harder I rummaged through my rucksack for my Berghaus, sniffing it suspiciously for any hint of museum.
The walk didn't keep us entirely to the beach. There were sections where we were taken inland a few metres to walk on a track thick with ferns and brambles. I had been left behind putting my coat on and was walking alone when I nearly stepped into a deep trench half-filled with water, hidden almost entirely by vegetation. Narrow, about eighteen inches deep, and running directly across the path — a near-perfect leg-breaker. I stepped around it and hurried to catch up.
The rain faltered and stopped. We watched a CalMac ferry passing in the distance, bound for Islay. A cormorant or two — or shag or two; I've since learned that in Britain both terms apparently apply to the same bird, which was new information to me — were hunting about in the shallows. The walk took us back onto the A83 briefly, required us to cross and walk on the far pavement, and then a blue post-marker directed us back across and down a track among scattered trees to the beach once more. We traipsed along and time became a little immaterial.
Mark had walked on ahead and stopped to examine something, waiting until I was close enough to see for myself. A dead seal pup, smelly and fairly mutilated, with at least one deep hole in its abdomen as if some peculiar scientist had taken a core sample from it. Jo was approaching behind me.
"Do you want to see a seal?" I asked.
"Well — yeah," he replied, a little guardedly.
I pointed at my feet.
Jo gave it the once-over. "It's only young, isn't it?"
We walked on and stopped by some dunes for a water break near a sign advertising a fish farm across the road.
"They've planted salmon this year," said Bod, "and are going to rotate with haddock the year after."
Silly sod.
Terminating at a terminal ....
Lunch at ten past twelve on the edge of the beach. Mark and I on a plank of wood bridging two dunes, Bod and Jo squatting on sand humps. I ate and gazed about and watched my new friend the red-breasted merganser dive for its own lunch. We were talking when something splashed largely in the water near the shore. We immediately began accusing each other of hurling something in. We were all so convincing of our innocence that I am satisfied none of us did it, and what it was shall remain a mystery.
We were on our feet again at quarter to one. It started raining again at quarter to one and one minute. Heavier this time. Mark was limping and had periods of quietness. We came across another dead seal pup, then a ram's skeleton, then a dead gull.
"This is turning into Carcass Beach," I muttered, but mostly to myself and nobody answered.
"What are the locals trying to tell us?" asked Bod.
I prodded a huge empty gin bottle with my walking pole.
"It's empty!" said Jo, rolling his eyes.
The rain stopped after half an hour and I cautiously peeped out from the cave of my hood like a coy tortoise. My feet were hurting again as we moved around the headland at Rhunahaorine, which turns out to be a significant winter feeding ground — the grassland around here draws white-fronted geese from Greenland each year, though they had the sense not to be here in September.
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Mark on the beach |
The Tayinloan ferry pier, when we reached it, was an unlovely construction that seemed to provide a sample of every shade of rust it was possible to oxidise. We skirted a large stone wall and passed through some small industry as we went by the pier. Jo, whose bladder had come under sustained good-natured pressure from the rest of us over the previous couple of days, immediately identified a public toilet and detoured toward it with a look of relief. Jo's bladder gives the impression of being able to multiply every cup of liquid he consumes by a factor of four, a condition he attributes to the herbal tea he drinks. He has claimed, in his defence, that the resulting necessity to use municipal toilets has enabled him to compile a detailed dossier on facilities encountered along the way, and that he is working on a book. *A Hundred Finest Daltons*, perhaps. Or *Washrooms of the Way*.
"The last toilet was great — it had liquid soap!" he reported as he headed off for his latest appraisal.
We cut inland across the Tayinloan pier car park and onto a lane between fields of bleating sheep. One waited until we were directly alongside and then squatted to generously poop in front of us.
"Charming," said Jo, watching its sphincter twitch. "Still — she winked at me."
"Yeah. You wish."
The nostalgic smell of coal fire reached me as we passed brick houses with smoke puffing from their chimneys. I plucked a large blackberry from a nearby bush and bit into it experimentally. It was overripe, tasted foul, and burst in my hand. I was limping distinctly as we reached the car and was glad to be finished, because it had started raining again.
A Campbeltown excursion ....
We drove home quickly and Mark retired for a hot bath, clutching his seized-up hip and lurching in the manner of a medieval dungeon guard. Over beers, Jo, Bod and I studied Friday's route. The Kintyre Way appeared to offer several options at various points — spurs, some of which seemed designed with the sole purpose of doubling the day's mileage in order to promote fatalities. We decided to stick to the advertised route, which brought its own complication: there appeared to be an old map of the Way and a new recommended version, and Bod was fairly sure his was the old one. A new map would need to be purchased from somewhere in Campbeltown. I had a hot bath to soak my protesting tissues. Jo had a snooze.
We drove into Campbeltown eventually — all four of us, once everyone had attended to their respective restoration routines.
We passed a sign for a place called Gobagrennan. It is really quite pathetic how immature four grown men can become in each other's sustained company. We were not satisfied until we had run through half a dozen variations of *Gob a green 'un!* with accompanying sniggers.
The drive demonstrated how much walking still lay ahead of us: twenty minutes by car on a much straighter road than the one we would be taking.
Campbeltown had a slightly grim aspect on first sight, though no worse than parts of every town I have ever visited. We concluded that we probably wouldn't be celebrating the end of the walk in any of its public houses.
The tourist information office would have sold us the new map, which would have been great, or at least would have been when the shop was open. It wasn't. We returned the way we'd come and stopped again at The Hunting Lodge Hotel, where the fire was roaring and the food this time was both plentiful and excellent — a significant improvement on the art nouveau scarcity of our first visit. We had time to relax and chat with the owner, who remained our designated walking committee member and apparent non-walker of the Way, before heading home.
Jo and I watched another couple of episodes of Fawlty Towers and then entertained ourselves considerably more by examining Mark's heel. It was fiery raw — the blister had long since burst and the exposed flesh beneath had spent the day being grated against the inside of his boot. God knows how he had managed to walk on it. Jo said it reminded him of the dead seal. Mark would decide in the morning whether he could compete in the next day's walking.
Before long we were in bed, which is something I've now found consistently across two walking trips and which continues to surprise the eighteen-year-old who lives inside my head. Before the West Highland Way last year I had genuinely believed that we would charge through each day's route and have energy spare for drinks, local exploration, perhaps dancing. Instead I had discovered that by the end of each walk I was calculating the effort of eating dinner as a necessary evil and was targeting the sack by half past nine at the absolute latest, and definitely alone. Some evenings I had seriously considered not bothering to get undressed.
I know, really, that this isn't a miscalculation of muscular effort. It is the gap between being forty years old in body and eighteen years old in head, and the two of them disagreeing about what is possible.
I went to sleep without once thinking that I should write some notes.
See Route on ......
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