| The Kintyre Way | |
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And then there were three ....
I was woken by the movements of Jo and Bod in the room at quarter past seven. My psyche revolted at the thought of another healthy breakfast and I joined the reprobates this morning for a fry-up.
"Sets you up for the day, that," said Bod.
Mark was greatly favouring his untreated heel and had decided he could not walk today. He would get himself off to the local GP surgery instead. I was saddened, but not surprised. His heel had looked like the kind of thing a group of plastic surgeons would stand around for a while before going off to one side to confer, wearing expressions ranging from gravity to alarm. He would have needed the healing properties of Wolverine to consider this day's walking.
It was a longer one too — over sixteen miles, another traverse of the peninsula from west coast to east, a lot of farmland and forestry walking, and the wind farm we had glimpsed and filmed from Loch Ciaran two days before.
Mark drove us to Tayinloan car park. It was an awkward moment. I knew it would be hard for him to be waving us off rather than coming along with us, but he gave me a hug and wished us all good luck and then went off to see a doctor. It felt strange — we'd done the entire West Highland Way together and I'd assumed we'd do this one together too. I did a short piece of filming, explaining Mark's absence and outlining the day ahead, and we set off at five to nine.
Up into the forest ....
The weather was grey and overcast and I suspected we'd be lucky to escape without being dumped upon. I noted that it was the fifth of September, which had form as far as mine and Mark's walking was concerned — exactly a year ago to the day, during the final stretch of the West Highland Way, we had spent the whole day getting absolutely lashed by heavy rain that simply would not let up. The three of us then — we had met a Glaswegian woman named Kathryn and formed a friendship that saw us complete the route together — had got thoroughly soaked despite expensive waterproof gear. We had forever after called that day Wet Tuesday. I looked doubtfully at the sky, hoping to be spared a repetition.
We went by some houses and then headed across fields. As we crossed a bridge over a river, we disturbed a grey heron at its breakfast. It flew off and looked haughtily down at us in passing. The fields led us briefly to the beach just south of the ferry pier, but a Way-post quickly redirected us inland again. We followed a track bordering a field — thick with long, dew-soaked grass — and within a few paces my trouser legs were drenched from the knees down. Bod and I discussed walks he had completed in England. We had done a lot of the same routes in the Lake District and the Pennines. Jo walked in companionable silence behind us.
Ravens were croaking in an unmelodious manner from one of these trees. It was a strange sound, almost metallic. We reached the A83 and crossed it, keeping our eyes open for lorries of a squashing nature, then immediately began ascending a track at a place called Killean. It was going to lead us into the hills.
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Bod and Jo ready for the days walking |
As we climbed, it began to rain — a fine, misty rain with an air of persistence about it. We stopped to shed a layer. I had developed an unaccountable thirst and had to drink deeply from my canteen, before making the obvious connection between this and the salty bacon and sausages I had consumed at breakfast. *Sets you up for the day.* Yes. Sets you up for severe dehydration, largely.
I also tried some filming, and was puzzled to find that the image through the viewfinder was almost entirely white. I looked around at the light and couldn't account for it. In the end I carried on filming anyway and hoped that what I could see through the viewfinder was not reflective of what was actually being committed to tape. I filmed Jo and Bod stalking off into the haze and hoped for the best.
The path was a broad one, used by forestry and wind-farm vehicles, bordered by deciduous woodland. I stopped to try more filming at intervals, always with the same baffling result. We climbed steadily to about seven hundred feet and the haze became thicker — almost steamy.
Windmills in the mist ....
Mark phoned Bod as we were still climbing. It wasn't good news. His walking was over for the week; the district nurse had advised rest and reading, on the grounds that the wound risked infection without it. She had attempted to counteract this by daubing the area with surgical spirit, and I was briefly surprised we hadn't heard Mark's howls from up here on the hill. I could imagine how he felt about his week ending like this. It was dispiriting news.
We continued to ascend and began to close in on a herd of free-roaming cattle. I clucked my tongue at them encouragingly as we went by. They looked back at us in silence, with an expression that seemed almost sympathetic. Examining them a little more closely, I began to understand why. Some of these hunks of steaming beef were distinctly male. They lacked udders, unless udders had changed shape since I last looked, they were twice the size of the heifers, and — unlike their female companions, who skittered away when we got close — they stood their ground and stared at us with calculating intent.
"That one's looking at us in an unfriendly way," breathed Bod.
One particular character seemed to be giving very serious consideration to a charge. He was positioned on a piece of turf slightly above us, our track sunk below the surrounding ground, and he appeared to be working out whether the jump down was worth the joy of impaling or trampling us to gory pieces. I walked on with my bum-cheeks clenching. I wasn't at all happy and had to pass within about three metres of him before I began to ease away. Even then I kept checking behind me every five paces to make sure he hadn't decided the jump was worth it after all. I was glad when the mist closed in behind us and hid his hostile gaze.
We finally neared the top of the gradient where the guidebook promised impressive views of Gigha, Islay and Jura. Visibility was about a hundred metres. Peering through the mist was like trying to look through ectoplasm. The track levelled off and the rain came in fits and starts, as if the clouds had a prostate problem. At times it got heavier and I stopped to pull on my Berghaus and waterproof trousers. Wet Wednesday, then. I drank deeply from my canteen again. No wonder Mark had got through all his water on day one. I must have consumed about half a tumbler of salt with that fry-up.
Little valleys fell away on each side of us. Sheep ran freely before us.
"I don't know why they bother with gates or fences around here," observed Jo. "Everything just runs freely."
I tried to penetrate the fog with my eyes. "Some good views from here on both sides, if it weren't for the mist."
The forest began to change from oaks to pine. I suddenly realised that we had set quite a pace this morning, because we were already approaching Deucheran Hill and the halfway point of the day.
"Here we are," Bod pointed at a sign. "The wind farm is around here."
I began to look out for turbines. You might think I wouldn't have to look very hard — they must be seventy or eighty feet high, after all. But the vapour had thickened again and I couldn't see a thing. I stopped and listened, unsure what sound a wind turbine made at close range but fairly confident it would be a large one — some kind of threatening whoosh, or possibly a bronchial giraffe.
As it happened, when the first one appeared it still managed to jump out on us. One moment there was nothing, and the next:
"There's one," said Bod, and I switched the camera on.
It had loomed out of the mist with the eerie sudden presence of something from an H.G. Wells novel, and I was captivated. I genuinely cannot understand why people object to wind turbines. I thought it was wonderful — like one of the tripods from *The War of the Worlds*, and the sounds it was making in the fog were genuinely atmospheric. They whooshed as the giant blades turned, but they also moaned as they scythed through the air. I find them graceful and considerably more pleasing than power stations with their belching cooling towers.
Powergen's wind farm at Deucheran Hill has a capacity of 15.75 MW, making it — at the time of our visit — the second largest under their ownership, after Bowbeat in the Scottish Borders. What 15.75 MW means in practical terms I have absolutely no idea. If Powergen were to claim that the farm provided enough electricity to run my son's PlayStation, keep Sky Sports operational and chill my beer to two degrees above freezing for seventeen consecutive years, I would be immediately and lastingly impressed. As it stands, 15.75 MW is just a collection of numbers and letters with a decimal point in the middle for effect. What I can engage with is their stated habitat management plan since 2002: improving feeding areas for golden eagles, improving heather cover to allow grouse numbers to increase, providing nesting rafts for red-throated divers, and monitoring the impact of the turbines on these species.
It sounds admirable. We didn't see any golden eagles or red-throated divers during our six days on the peninsula, which might tentatively suggest the turbines have scared them all off already, but anything that tries to promote local wildlife conservation is a fair trade-off for having a wind farm. I remain a fan.
I passed the first turbine and approached a second one. The rain was pattering down more insistently than ever. After a brief rest — during which I glugged desperately from my canteen — we continued and the track began taking us downhill. A track I could see winding away in the distance — serpentine, disappearing and then reappearing considerably further along before beginning an equally curvaceous climb up another rise — looked exhausting to contemplate. Just looking at it made my feet ache. As it happened, it wasn't our path; we turned left and descended on a much straighter course. But the seed was sown and I was aware of my leg-ends throbbing for the rest of the afternoon.
The village on life-support ....
We swept around Carradale Water, one of those small rivers that cuts cheerfully into a scene and babbles at you until flouncing out of sight, and approached some farm buildings. When the rain briefly lessened, I was joined by flies — not the tiny midges of a couple of days ago, but larger, noisier ones that shot around my head at speed before perching suddenly on my nose or eyebrows. I tried to ignore them. They interpreted this as encouragement and became more intimate. I was forced to retaliate when one individual attempted to climb into my left nostril. What followed was a period of snorting, face-wiping and futile swatting as I clumped along, swearing freely.
We found the driest available spot on the edge of a conifer wood for lunch. This wood had a precarious aspect — half its trees were either horizontal or leaning drunkenly on their neighbours, felled at some point by storm or spindliness and left where they had fallen. I spent much of my lunch break casting uneasy glances into the shadowed depths, contemplating the possibility of being pulped halfway through my salt and vinegar crisps. Bod informed us that we had walked ten miles, leaving another six on legs that were now conspicuously tender. The wood was gloomy but peaceful and kept us dry and provided a log to sit on, which was all we required of it. I did some filming, the commentary accompanied throughout by Bod's crisp packet providing something that sounded like bad static.
When I stood up to leave, I became briefly and acutely aware of every complaint my body had been filing quietly all morning. After a few minutes walking the worst of it eased. A small valley appeared in our path and we edged around it, and looking back I could see the little wood in the mid-distance. One of those occasional moments arrived — regarding something briefly encountered, knowing you will never see it again — and I felt a small, unreasonable sadness at leaving it. I'd rather liked the place, despite the reasonable chance of being squashed inside it.
A concrete track deposited us onto the B842 at Brackley for a short while, then we left the road and climbed again — steadily at first and then with increased ambition. We filed up a narrow, muddy track hemmed in on both sides by young dripping saplings, Bod leading, then me, then Jo. I began to sweat as we plodded upwards and was grateful for the branches anointing me with rainwater. The sweat trickled down my spine and my legs burned, but nobody seemed willing to be the first to stop for breath, so we continued at an unfaltering pace until we reached the top and turned right onto a wider path past more abandoned logging.
This section of the walk began to feel endless — unchanging scenery of set-back trees and broken earthy track — and my spirit whimpered a little when we turned a bend and found a track wrenched upwards at an angle only a goat would view with enthusiasm.
"This is twisting the knife," said Bod. He was still smiling when he said it.
It was painful but mercifully brief, and at the top we were exposed to the full weight of wind and renewed rain at about seven hundred feet, walking along something resembling a ridge of dumped earth. The camera was still blanching everything white, so I put it away and walked into the buffeting and blustery weather. The wind up here was the most powerful I had experienced since arriving on Kintyre and I felt myself fighting it with each step.
The flies, when we descended, found me again. I became convinced that specific individuals were targeting me — that once they had a trial soar past and caught my particular chemical signature, they were devoted to me exclusively. I actually observed one circumnavigate Jo in order to buzz me. I was reduced to thrashing at the air with my walking pole and conducting a running argument with insects, which was the situation I was in when we encountered fellow walkers coming the other way, accompanied by a dog.
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Cnoc nan Gabhar |
Day walkers.
I felt unreasonable contempt rise inside me as they hurried away, leaving the air behind them scented with Lynx body spray and Nivea face cream. Had they walked the moors from Claonaig to Clachan? Had they formed a meaningful relationship with a red-breasted merganser? Did either of them own a seeping groin? Bah.
The sun attempted to bleed through the grey and the light softened a little, paradoxically accompanied by rain still slanting down my coat collar onto my neck. We descended through blackberry-lined paths back to the Kilbrannan Sound on the east coast, and I looked back at the conquered Cnoc nan Gabhar — the hill of goats.
"So much for you, little hill," I told it, with a dismissive wave.
"It wasn't the hill so much as the slog before it," Bod pointed out.
"True."
We filed into the little fishing village of Carradale on the last stretch. The path deposited us directly at the gates of the local primary school. Given our collective condition, I was not entirely comfortable with this — three shabby, dirty, malodorous men lingering at school gates. I mentioned this to the others.
"It's alright," said Jo. "My injunction doesn't stretch to Scotland."
Carradale appeared to be a village on life support, and showing no vital signs. Bod and I had entertained modest hopes of a beer at the end of the day's hard slogging, but these were extinguished by a succession of closed hotels and the complete absence of a pub. Crestfallen and fairly dehydrated — I blamed the morning's preserved bacon — we limped down to the harbour and phoned Brian. We got his answering machine, left a message, and waited, not knowing when he would receive it. To improve the atmosphere while we waited, it began to rain with renewed purpose.
I realised I was beginning to shiver. Not particularly cold outside — but I was wet through, my underwear felt damp, and tiredness was making its own contribution. Thankfully Brian received our message and arrived before we were forced to identify which bush we would be spending the night under. Two minutes into the fifty-minute journey home, I glanced at Jo. He had clicked off whatever internal switch operates his lights and was hanging forward in his seat, immobile, like C3PO in the Star Wars films. He remained in this attitude for most of the journey back.
Party Animals ....
Mark was waiting outside the apartment when we pulled up, and I had anticipated finding him in some kind of dismal state, but he had consumed half a bottle of wine during the afternoon and greeted us with bright and cheerful eyes. He had already planned some trips for himself for the following two days — Arran, possibly Gigha — and seemed genuinely at peace with the situation.
We washed steaming laundry and completed a flash shopping trip — ostensibly for basics, transparently for more beer — and after dinner we all sat around consuming said beer while Mark had whisky, talking a little about the day's walking. I reviewed the footage I had taken. It was exactly as it had appeared through the viewfinder: like watching through cheesecloth.
I eventually motivated myself enough for a bath and spent time soaking the stiffness away. Jo grabbed a snooze. We made a game attempt at watching television but were kidding nobody and drifted to bed by ten. Mark had read and cat-napped for much of the afternoon and was the freshest of us all, but he had no chance of finding anyone willing to stay up with him.
I scribbled some notes for about an hour after getting into bed and then settled down. I plunged into slumber as if my consciousness had been weighted with iron.
See Route on ......
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