| The Kintyre Way | |
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Breakfast with the wildlife ....
Mark came into the room at seven and tapped my quilted form.
"Why?" he said.
"Why d'you think?"
"I snored?" "Yup."
He was very apologetic, which was entirely unnecessary since I'd slept well and felt immensely better than I had the previous night. So much so that I hurried off to make breakfast — porridge and banana, perfect hiking food, full of energy-giving carbohydrates and anti-cramp potassium. This was all very well until the rich aroma of Mark and Bod's fry-up caressed my nostrils and set my salivary glands squirting indiscriminately. I managed to ignore the tantalising smells of bacon, sausage and frying eggs, but then had to sit with them as they heartily gorged on dead pig, beans, toast and all the essential artery-hardeners that accompany a traditional full English. My healthy option congealed in my mouth and assumed all the gastric qualities of grouting.
To distract myself, I began scanning the sea and rocks for wildlife through my binoculars. I became excitedly convinced that I'd spotted seals in the water and dashed to the window, urging my companions — a little hysterically, I'll admit — to come and see.
"Sure they're not rocks?" grunted Bod, clearly reluctant to leave his plate of dead animals even momentarily.
"No — I've been watching for a while and they're moving!"
Mark and Bod performed a kind of half-raise from their seats in the name of courtesy and peered through the windows. Bod lowered himself back to his meal. "They're rocks," he said, in a tone that translated transparently as *stop being a twat*. "The tide's going out and revealing them."
"Are you sure?" I replied, but I could see for myself now that the shapes were clearly very solid chunks of granite. I returned meekly to my cooling porridge, convinced that Mark and Bod were exchanging unkind glances behind me.
Bod, who had been flicking through the visitors' book again, spoke up after a while.
"I think I've solved the mystery of why there are no seals out there."
"Oh yeah? Why?"
"There's been a Canadian family staying here. They've gone out onto the beach and clubbed them all."
I considered this. "Well, there are no whales either. Has there been a Japanese family staying?"
Once ablutions were complete we made a trip to the local store that Bod and I had discovered on yesterday's beach walk and bought, it must be said, quite a lot of beer.
A harbour, a castle and a bog ....
Dean arrived at half past nine and we all piled into his van with the particular expectancy of people who are finally, actually, about to begin the thing they have been planning for the best part of a year. I looked down at my feet and wriggled my toes inside the unfamiliar clasp of my walking boots, like a child on the morning of a school trip. Jo stayed awake during the journey, although it was touch and go and his head dipped once or twice.
Dean dropped us at Tarbert and drove on to Claonaig, where Mark followed in his own car to leave it waiting for our arrival later on foot. The logic of the taxi arrangement — be driven to wherever you need to start, walk to where you left your car the previous day — was elegantly simple in theory. In practice it required a certain willingness to be collected and deposited about the peninsula at odd hours by a man who was increasingly becoming a fixture in our story.
My initial impressions of West Tarbert from the previous evening — a place squatting sulkily beside its inlet in a somewhat beaten-up manner — were mollified on this morning by the sight of the town centre and harbour in daylight. It was pretty and had character, which is true of most fishing ports if you arrive when the light is right.
Tarbert sits at the head of Loch Fyne — *Lake Fine* in Scottish Gaelic — a sea loch that extends forty miles inland and is the largest of its kind around Scotland. The town has been a herring fishing port since the early 1830s and still earns much of its living from the sea, supplemented these days by visiting yachts and the considerable number of tourists who find their way to this corner of Argyll.
Mark opened proceedings with some filming of the harbour and of us preparing for the start: fastening clothing, adjusting straps, taking photographs, extending walking poles and experimenting with fake Scottish accents. We then strolled together to the official starting point of the Kintyre Way. Some bloke who had only come out to do a little shopping with his somewhat unlovely wife was pressed, a little reluctantly, into taking a photograph of all four of us with Mark's camera. He obliged willingly enough and then we were off.
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Romantic Tarbert Castle |
Mark's voice came from somewhere behind me.
"That'd be good — two minutes into the walk and I suffer a coronary."
I could have kissed him.
The steps delivered us to a grassy plateau and I approved heartily of the scenery and began filming it, immediately attracting a squadron of midges who evidently sensed my vulnerability — both hands occupied, the camera in one and my walking pole in the other. I attempted commentary to a background of buzzing aerial sorties on my exposed flesh. Bod took photographs.
Below us, Tarbert harbour sat nestled in its shallow valley, the water of the bay stretching out into Loch Fyne and animated with boats. Across it all, Cowal could be made out in the distance. Above us, the ruin of Tarbert Castle looked ivy-smothered and rather like a worn-down molar. Mark went off to have a closer look and we shouldered our packs and moved on. The route went upward again past a sign warning of adders.
"On Geiger," said Bod, "they'd be called Geiger counters."
The woodland above Tarbert was mixed and open — birch, hazel and willow on a track knobbly with stones — and then gave way to moorland generous with heather. Little wooden bridges had been provided where becks crossed the path, a thoughtful provision that we appreciated. We climbed past hills with names like Cruach Bhuidhe — Yellow Hill — and Sron Gharbh — Steep Hill, which delivered on its name — before levelling out through pine woods and then breaking into open space where the path turned right and a vast sheet of water opened before us. The hill dropped away and trees marched down it in ranks toward the shore, and we stood and looked out at what we thought was Loch Fyne before one of us checked the map and established it was the Sound of Bute — and what does a Bute sound like? In our case, murmurs of admiration. A Caledonian MacBrayne ferry inched across it and gave the scene its scale. It was immensely satisfying to be standing there breathing it all in.
The track descended and the ground became, gradually, then distinctly, then comprehensively boggy. Bod began to pull ahead. The three of us walked together through the wet bits in companionable and sporadic conversation.
Skipping along the Skipness ....
After a couple of hours we found the driest available spot and stopped for lunch near Meall Donn — which translates as Brown Mound or Mass, an accurate description — sitting down and immediately getting the seats of our trousers wet. I ate my sandwiches and gratefully drank hot coffee while looking out at trees and unnamed distant hills. Mark caught my eye across the wet grass and for some reason we both found something simultaneously funny about the moment and burst out laughing. I still don't know why. Jo, seizing the opportunity, quickly ate his lunch, lay on his back, used his pack as a pillow and closed his eyes. Midges arrived to sober my mood and feast on me. Slapping at them left me with red hand-shapes on my face, so I was glad when we moved on.
I took the camera from Mark to film a stretch I thought would work well: the others walking through an iron gate and down a track that formed a corridor through thick ferns and heather. I waited for them to round the bend and out of sight. Bod kept walking. Jo walked a few steps and stopped. Mark stopped.
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Jo and Colin |
The quietness descended on me like gentle snow. Wind soughed through branches. Birds began to cautiously voice their presence. I realised that this must happen all the time as we walk through a place — we fill an area with our own noise and intent, hushing the wildlife, causing it to withdraw to a prudent distance, and as we pass on and our conversation fades, there is a watchful pause and then the place fills again with its natural sounds. I stood still and shared in it for a while. Then I ran to catch the others.
We joined the Skipness River on our left, mostly hidden by trees, occasionally yielding a glimpse of its water chasing over smooth boulders. My feet had begun to suggest, without making too much of a fuss about it, that stopping might be a reasonable idea at some point. We still had at least three miles to walk, so there would be no stopping. There would also be no massage with scented oils from the German waitress, who was about twenty years younger than any of us and would, therefore, be repelled by the idea of kneading the Walford anatomy in any form.
The river stretched eventually fell behind us and the track climbed again, swiftly above the tree-line. A pair of buzzards yelped at each other as they wheeled over pine trees and across a small valley. Jo and I searched for them with binoculars but they remained as they were — ghostly yapping noises in the sky. On the far side of the valley a huge and horrendous scar had been left where a whole section of trees had been crudely hacked away. The disfigurement kept drawing my attention in the way that a glass eye in the person next to you on the bus inevitably does.
Comparing blisters ....
We breasted the rise at last onto the highest point of the day, a short walk across open land with views of hills in all directions. Below, the earth had been dug over and disturbed in a way that suggested significant construction of some kind. I detoured over to it and found myself looking into an enormous hole — diggers and dumpers abandoned like toys at its base across a wide area of heaped and furrowed soil, every tree that had stood here obliterated. I felt like an ant on the lip of a breakfast bowl.
"Whoa," said Jo, appearing beside me. "It does surprise you, doesn't it?"
We walked on and arrived at a track that descended toward Skipness Bay — Skipness being Norse for Ship Point — in a straight line steep enough to require frequent stabs of the walking pole for balance. Mark and Bod were already a good way below us. We made our way down and around the bay in a south-westerly direction until we reached a couple who were doing things to their garden with clippers and Mark, who had finished his water, managed to negotiate a refill.
As we rejoined Bod and Jo, we found them sitting on the ground laughing together.
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Arran across Kilbrannan Sound |
"Bod said that they wait for English walkers to come and ask for refills and then fill the bottles from the toilet cistern."
Daft. It does, however, begin to sow a seed of doubt.
Walking on, the views of Arran opened up across the Kilbrannan Sound — a deeply-cleft valley visible on the island, and through binoculars we could make out two tiny paragliders working its fissure like scraps of wedding confetti. We watched shags climbing awkwardly over rocks and then transforming into graceful creatures the moment they entered the water. Gannets cruised overhead, tucking their wings suddenly and plummeting at velocity into the sea with an odd *fushing* sound. Mark spent some time tracking individual birds with the camera, but they teased him by hovering, appearing about to drop, and then flicking their wings and cruising on. He missed the moment every time.
"Okay — I admit it," I said after a while. "Looks like I'm the first to come out in a blister."
"No — I've got one too," replied Mark.
"Yeah and me," confirmed Jo.
Mark sidled up alongside me. "Do you think Bod's got one?"
"If he has, I'll bet he denies it," I answered. Mark smiled. "Bod — you got any blisters?" he called out to the steadily striding form ahead.
"No."
We exchanged knowing looks. The last laugh was on us, as it turned out. Bod never seemed to be bothered by blisters. His feet must be like hooves.
Fish chips and Porridge ....
The road walking that signalled the end of the day's hiking brought us around a corner and into the ferry port of Claonaig. I felt that the day had been well-judged in length — just enough to establish the appetite for the week ahead, stopping at the point when feet were beginning to raise the subject in earnest. We spent a few minutes at the ferry timetables and changed our footwear and then headed back to Tarbert for tea.
This is, I should note, the central madness of walking for pleasure: leaving a place in the morning, toiling up hills, through bogs and along hard roads, to arrive back at the very place you departed from several hours before. I recommend it without reservation.
We ate in a fish and chip café. I did a little people-watching, the highlight of which was a tall, bespectacled man who came through the doorway and got his facial contours tangled up with a wind chime dangling from the ceiling. The musical utterances of the thing were at odds with the twisted expression and finger-grappling of the bemused customer. I had to look firmly away.
Mark drove us home. An hour later we were freshly showered, appraising our third beers of the evening and watching old episodes of Porridge. Bod was nodding off where he sat, so pretty much everybody shoved off to bed by nine. I tried to watch *As Good As It Gets* but it still hadn't finished at midnight and I desperately needed to flake out.
I might never know how it ends.
See route on ...
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