I’ve done it again. After promising to write more often, I’ve neglected this poor blog for three straight months. Whoops.
Setting aside the reasons for my absence, it’s suddenly the end of May. This time of year is so beautiful – it’s no wonder this is the month people start arriving in camper vans, driving very slowly along the road so they can catch the view.
Hey, I get it. It’s gorgeous out here.
It’s prime gardening weather, too. I spent last weekend turning a bramble forest (literally) into a habitable patch of garden again. Previously hidden behind a fallen gate and an enormous New Zealand flax plant, it’s now accessible without a machete in hand.
Here’s a before photo.
I’d spent about two hours cutting through the giant flax plant’s leaves with a pair of shears – and if you’ve ever done that, you know how difficult it is. When I turned the corner and found myself face to fact with this, I have to admit I hesitated for a moment.
Then I broke out the electric hedge trimmer and began slashing my way through the brambles like Joan of Arc (incidentally my namesake). By the time I got to the butterfly bush, I began thinking, “Ah – this must be what it feels like to be a swordsman. I bet their shoulders hurt after a battle, too.”
In total, it took me three days to shear the entire area (carefully avoiding bluebells as I went along) and coppice the willow hedge enclosing two sides of the area.
Here’s what it looks like now.
There’s the polytunnel on the left: beloved by some and hated by others. It’s been a great place to grow plants that don’t appreciate the changeable Scottish weather or need extra heat. At the moment, it’s filled with flowering sage, onions, accidental romaine lettuce (I let a plant go to seed last year, and now its babies carpet the gravel between the raised beds), potatoes, strawberries, spinach, random calendula and various types of pepper, including the infamous Dorset Naga. That’ll blow the top of your head off.
I digress.
There’s still work to do up in the “secret garden” – I’ve exposed several metres of cliff face on the right there, and now have summit fever and want to tear the canes off the rest of it. More fool me, as I react badly to bramble scratches and thorns. Clearly I’m a glutton for punishment.
This project hasn’t been the only one I’ve plowed through recently. A couple of weeks ago, I turned our pond area from this…
…into this.
The five or six canna lilies I’ve had languishing in the greenhouse for a couple of years now have a new home on the edge of the water. I’m not sure how they’ll cope with limited hours of light, but they’ll love the boggy soil.
That’s it for now. I’ll leave you with a photo of what neglected sage and self-sown calendula look like in a vase. Rather pretty, actually.
You know the feeling when a headache suddenly clears? Everything seems better and brighter from one moment to another.
Well, that’s what happened when Camille and I went up to Dunan Muasdale (colloquially known as Muasdale Dun) for the first time this year. Described by Canmore as an “almost circular dun measuring 13.5m by 12m internally”, this old lookout spot sits on top of a rocky hill about a mile from the ocean.
Whenever I walk up the road toward the peninsula’s interior, I think, “What must it have been like to carry fish up from the sea to feed the people who kept watch in this thing?” At one point, the four-metre-thick walls were much taller. There’s probably been some type of structure there since prehistoric times – it’s such an obvious spot for a dun.
But nobody knows. Well, officially. Out here, there are still many things to discover and many structures yet to record.
Trudge up the road a couple more miles and you’ll walk straight into the clear remains of a prehistoric village, with multiple hut circles, a mound and a cist. Several thousand years ago, babies were born there and brought out to see the sun set over Islay. There were wolves and lynx living in the old-growth forest, and native wild boar on the menu for supper.
You won’t find that place marked on an Ordnance Survey map – not yet. It’s there, though.
It feels grounding to walk the same routes as our ancestors. The soil here is rich; excellent for crops. Neolithic farmers knew that when they began rolling the biggest boulders onto the edges of the ancient fields they dug. Humans know where best to settle.
I’ll show you around when it gets warmer and brighter. We’ll go to the half-built mansion house, now mostly fallen away. Then, we’ll take the winding route up to what we call “Heart Rock” – a wide, flat stone by the roadway, covered in cup marks – before visiting an ancient settlement nestling in forestry land at the top of the hill. Finally, we’ll hike back down into the woods and explore Achaglass, with its cottages, sheep pens and illegal whisky still (well, what’s left of it) embedded in the rocky burnside.
For now, here’s a glimmering view from the top of the dun. Isn’t it beautiful?
The weather hasn’t been friendly today. In fact, it’s “blowing a hooley”, and has been for most of the afternoon, with sustained gale-force winds and 70mph gusts. The storm isn’t supposed to die down until midnight.
I can feel the heavy weight of winter on my shoulders. I haven’t walked the loop in five days. Thankfully, tomorrow’s forecast looks much better – especially in the morning.
Camille’s been waiting a whole week to walk with me, so I’ll brew coffee, drink a cup and then head up the hill with her in tow. We’ll hike as far as we can before the mud stops us: past the burn, along the winding track toward the first abandoned farm. Then we’ll turn back, head down the road to the beach and hunt for sea glass, shells and other ocean treasures thrown up by the westerly.
It won’t be long until signs of spring begin to appear. First, we’ll see snowdrops, then Solomon’s Seal, wild narcissus and tiny yellow primroses. Soon, the sea stacks will shimmer with bluebells, and there’ll be a purple haze on the hill behind the house again.
It’s relentlessly wet. After two days of relatively decent weather, we’re back to endless wind and rain.
Even the sheep seem a bit pissed off – and sheep are not easily vexed. The last time I walked “the loop” on Sunday (a circa 2.5-mile hike into the peninsula, emerging at the south end of the village), I ran into a group of sodden ewes. Our eyes met as I passed.
“Ba-a-a-ah,” I said.
“Is it nearly spring yet?” they all replied, wordlessly.
This close to the sea, the air is damp in any season. The rubber seals at the bottom of my car windows provide a habitat for long-stemmed moss, even in summer, which I find fascinating (and perhaps a little disconcerting).
But January takes precipitation to another level. Farm and forestry roads turn into temporary rivers and wash away underfoot, and one by one, hillsides develop deep, brown wounds as layers of grass slide away.
There’s usually a break between storms, but not this week. High winds and sleet every single day for the foreseeable future.
I had planned to write about gardening, puffins and the island just three miles out across the water, but then the pandemic struck, and everything changed overnight.
Then I thought, “Hey, I’ll write about living through the pandemic out here.” But I didn’t.
Maybe navigating through the crisis took up all my mental energy; maybe I just took on too many freelance writing jobs. I can’t remember now.
Anyway, I’m back.
“So,” I hear you ask, “what prompted this reemergence? Why now?”
In short, because everything has changed. I’m still here, out on the edge of the world, but almost everything else is different. The best way to describe it is an awakening: I’ve woken up after a long period of dormancy.
For the first time, I feel both alone and capable. Those two feelings would have been incompatible with one another when I was younger. If I felt alone, I’d also feel somewhat lost. Now, I know I can navigate. As the popular meme saying goes (approximately) my track record of survival thus far is 100%. The evidence is irrefutable: I get through stuff.
I’m doing things I haven’t done in years. Painting, for example, and drawing. My old art teacher, Mr Gaskin, would probably be pleased with me — pleased to hear I’d retained the will to create. If I could find him, I’d tell him, but I have no idea where he is now.
It’s been so long.
Oh — sorry — you meant, “What led to you writing this post now?” I went a bit too deep there, didn’t I.
Well, this evening, I came across a folder of old music in an ancient hard disc backup. I used to own most of it on CD and would listen to it while walking miles between jobs each day at the beginning of the millennium.
I burned the candle at both ends in those days, and everywhere I went, I wore earbuds. Music ran through almost every moment of my life.
The music I found flipped a light switch in part of my brain. All of a sudden, there I was, standing inside this large, vital room I’d forgotten in my mind. Dusty objects, books, papers, half-finished creative endeavours were all over the place.
“Shit. How could I have forgotten about this place?”
I’d walked out of there years ago, maybe just to make a cup of tea, and hadn’t returned. Nobody had been in there since. But nothing was missing. Everything was as it had been.
Hello, me. How’ve you been?
So, I’m back. I am unearthed again. It’s an interesting feeling.
Even now, I struggle to describe just how beautiful Kintyre is – especially in summer. Life bursts out of every part of the landscape. Colours seem richer and deeper here than they are anywhere else I’ve ever been.
Let’s go on a journey from Ayrshire to Largieside.
You begin by driving northeast on the undulating A737 over shallow hills, past cows and sheep and old farms and wind turbines, through the little town of Dalry and into bustling Linwood. There, you join the M8 and get lost in traffic for a while before merging onto the A898 and passing over the swollen Clyde on the Erskine Bridge. Glasgow is a busy place, isn’t it.
After you leave the city, the route gets simpler. You turn onto the A82 and travel northwest, through Dumbarton and into Loch Lomond territory.
All of a sudden, things seem much prettier. The cascading blue loch sits to the right, sun pouring warm light over the mountains on its easterly side.
You pass the turnoff for Luss and continue on past Inverbeg and Stuckgowan before turning left onto the smaller A83.
There, the road winds down into the little village of Tarbet, which means “narrow isthmus”. Tarbet sits at the bottom of a low valley between Loch Lomond and Loch Long. Roughly 750 years ago, a band of charming Viking raiders pulled their longships out of the sea at Arrochar on Loch Long and dragged them a mile and a half to Tarbet so that they could raid settlements along Loch Lomond.
Arrochar and Tarbet together represent something of a border between public transport options in Argyll and Bute and those in the rest of Scotland. People travelling by train have to disembark at Arrochar and hitch a ride on the 926 coach if they want to keep going. The railway runs no further west: you’re heading into the wild.
Anyway, you continue on past Succoth, rounding the head of the loch. The trees on the edge of the road are sparse and through them, you can see an expanse of gentle water and beyond that, a steep vista against the sky.
At Ardgartan, the road begins to wind again, curving through dark woodland and out into sunshine again. Land falls away on the left and stretches up on the right as you travel further and further into the mountains.
If you look out of the window, you can trace the path of a burn twisting across the valley floor. Sprawling evergreen forests sprawl like giant rugs over the landscape, while yellow-blooming heathers, punctuated with ferns, tumble down steep slopes. Every now and again, you’ll see a long waterfall in the distance.
The road keeps ascending. Buzzards ride updrafts and hang in the air, while smaller birds flock across the valley. If you want a better look at the Old Military Road meandering through Glen Croe, you can swing into the car park at the infamous Rest and Be Thankful. Ahead, Loch Restil cuts a thin trough through the pass.
Next, you drive past Cairndow and on to Loch Fyne, where the asphalt winds around the edge of sparkling water again. A while later, you’ll cross a humpbacked bridge and see Inveraray Castle on your right before heading into the town itself.
Occasionally, the big sea loch disappears and you bumble through arable land, but you always met the inlet again eventually. You’ll pass through Lochgilphead and over the narrow metal Crinan Canal swing-bridge at Ardrishaig, continuing on past Inverneill and Erines and the salmon farm just offshore.
Finally, you’ll descend into Tarbert, where the main street bends around the harbour. Several cafes, a couple of pubs, gift shops, art galleries, a small supermarket, an ironmonger shop, a butcher and a newsagent line up facing the water in a semicircle. Fishing boats enter and leave the sheltered port via a narrow bottleneck several hundred metres out.
Up and out you go, past the parish church and the village hall. Soon you pass West Loch House and then a sign welcoming you to Kintyre.
You continue along the edge of Loch Tarbert, past the Kennacraig terminal with its big Islay car ferry docked and ready for departure, and on through Whitehouse and Clachan.
Then, suddenly at the top of a blind summit, the overhanging trees give way to a broad landscape and you see the sound of Gigha for the first time, water glimmering blue and green in the sunlight. Jura sits on the horizon, its iconic paps creating a natural skyline. According to local legend, Kintyre’s ancient inhabitants considered the island a mother goddess and erected standing stones on the peninsula to worship her.
As you drive south, Jura’s matriarchal peaks slide behind the northern tip of Gigha. You zip past boulder-strewn croft land covered in tough scrub grass and reeds, and on the shore side, sheep and cows of all colours graze in flat fields next to the ocean.
There are flowers everywhere in spring and summer. Rhododendrons bloom along the roadside, while yellow rock roses, daisies, red clover and purple vetch spill out of ditches and meadows and gaps in stone walls. Shades of green are incredibly chromatic.
Deserted beaches of pale sand, abandoned stone cottages, old roofless churches enclosed in ivy, clifftop farmhouses and trees covered in thick moss fly by. Seagulls congregate and follow moving tractor plows; robins chase sparrows in and out of bushes at the side of the trail.
If you pull over at Muasdale and walk down to the beach, you’ll see a gigantic weather-worn boulder in the sand. Lemon-coloured marsh marigolds and buttercups, pink vicia, herb robert and bramble flowers spring over the beach border. It’s gorgeous.
And that’s where we’ll stop, because that’s home. That’s where all our adventures begin.
“Where would you live if you could live anywhere?” I asked.
“Kintyre,” he replied, “Nobody ever thinks of Kintyre.”
Now, every morning when I wake up and look out of the window, I see the ocean, which is never the same twice. Sometimes, sea mist rolls in and settles on our little village, obscuring the view. On clear days, I can see the island of Cara three miles out, its craggy mull facing south. People say that Cara has a brownie living on it – but that’s for another post.
Gigha lies a bit further north, with its secluded gardens, art gallery, post office and wind farm. If you wander down to the beach not far away, you can watch the little ro-ro ferry bobbing its way back and forth between Tayinloan and Ardminish. When the sea gets rough, Gigha’s inhabitants are left trapped on their six-mile-long island, reduced to a hopeful line of twinkling lights in the darkness of night.
Sometimes the ocean in front of me sits calm as a pane of glass, reflecting the sky like a mirror. When the wind kicks up, things get choppier and early on bright summer mornings, joyful little sailboats appear not far off shore. When the westerly gales roll in over the winter, the water turns a deep shade of green and covers the sand completely.
So, here we are, living out on the edge of the world. And it’s beautiful.
