Ages: Colin was 68 years and 59 days. Rosemary was 65 years and 201 days.
Weather: Persistent rain most of the day.
Location: Barcaldine to Oban.
Distance: 13½ miles.
Total
distance: 2456 miles.
Terrain: Cycle
tracks. Walking along very busy roads,
sometimes with pavement but often without.
Path along old railway track.
Nearly all flat.
Tide: In.
Rivers: No.294, Dearg Abhainn. No.295, Loch
Etive.
Ferries: None.
Piers: None.
Kissing
gates: None.
Pubs: None.
‘Historic Scotland’
properties: No.23, Bonawe
Ironworks. No. 24, Dunstaffnage Castle. (We visited these on a very wet day in
September because we didn’t have time on this trip.)
Ferris wheels: None.
Diversions: None.
How we got there and
back: We were staying in our caravan at
Barcaldine. This morning Colin drove to
Oban and parked the car near Tesco. He
then caught a bus back to the caravan site.
Meanwhile I made the sandwiches.
We started our Walk from the caravan.
At the end, we finished our
Walk near the bus station in Oban. We
had our tea and caramel shortcake, then returned to Barcaldine.
The next day we packed up
and returned home to Malvern, taking two days to do so.
The caravan site on which we were staying in Barcaldine is situated in an
old Victorian walled garden, so it was well protected from the gales which have
been sweeping this part of Scotland
over the past few days. We exited the
site this morning through a gateway in those walls, directly on to the cycle path
where we had left it at the end of the last Walk.
We followed the cycle path on its wiggly
route through the forest, it seemed ages before we came out on to the road. I felt sure we’d walked twice as far as we
would have done had we walked directly along the road, but at least we were
away from the traffic! Everything was
very soggy, even the fine displays of foxgloves we passed on the route.
Eventually we came out on the
road, which we crossed and continued down the track of the old railway the
other side. But when we came to the
SeaLife Centre the cycle path stopped.
The embankment of the old railway continued, but from thereon it was so
overgrown as to be impossible to walk.
We had a good look at it, but it was quite inaccessible.
We were not best pleased, in fact we were hopping mad! The road was busy, had no pavements, and it
kept raining. Visibility was poor, and
although we wore high-vis vests over our kags, we didn’t feel entirely
safe. In fact it was HORRIBLE and we
didn’t enjoy it one bit! The most annoying
thing was that the railway embankment continued in its entirety for the next
three miles alongside the road between us and the water.
Even the bridges over streams were intact,
but it had been allowed to overgrow. All
it would have needed was a few people with machetes for a couple of weeks to
clear a decent footpath. I’m sure they
could have found volunteers amongst local walkers to do the job and keep costs
down. (We would have volunteered if it
had been local to us.) But nobody had.
We trudged on. After about a mile
we came across a twenty yard stretch of the railway embankment which had been cleared, and very nice it was
too. It was opposite some houses, so
perhaps they had cleared the area so they could sit out with views over the
loch. Even the grass had been mown — luxury! It had stopped raining momentarily, so we sat
on this ‘lawn’ to eat our pies, away from the road at last. But not for long — as soon as we stopped
moving the midges found us, and they were dire! So we had to move on pretty damn quick!
I had needed that rest, I was all in.
I hadn’t wanted to walk today because I was too tired and the weather
was awful, but Colin had said, “Let’s get to Oban, and then go home!” So I came, but I was finding it difficult to
cope. Further on we came to the entrance
of a quarry where I found a bank to sit on for five minutes and rest my
legs. I was very tempted to catch a bus
into Oban and call an end to our walking this session, but I didn’t. Fortunately the midges didn’t find us because
we were not near trees.
We bypassed the next peninsula because none of the roads which led into
it accessed the shore (Additional Rule no.11).
As we entered the village
of Benderloch (pavements
at last!) we passed an extraordinary building.
It is called ‘Victory Hall’ and looked as if it had originally had some
military purpose. It seemed to be made
of corrugated iron, but not quite. It is
obviously used as the village hall. We
were making for a picnic area just beyond the village but we were not looking
forward to eating our sarnies in the rain.
Then we passed a café, and that was it!
We spent a pleasant hour in there eating toasties and — most important
of all — DRINKING TEA! I can’t describe
how wonderful it was to smell the aroma of hot tea as the waitress brought the
pot to our table. Blow the picnic in the
rain!
We were amused by and in admiration of the two
women at the next table who had in their charge two babies and four
toddlers. One of the toddlers was
handicapped, cerebral palsy I think. Yet
they were beautifully behaved, and the two women coped fantastically with all
their little idiosyncrasies. It just
shows how it can be done, even with tiny children such as these. Children needn’t be a nuisance in a public
place, they don’t need to be running about getting under people’s feet, and
what a marvellous lesson in social etiquette these children were getting on a
cold wet grey day in their school holidays!
These children all seemed happy and content, and we were amused by their
questions and conversation.
Feeling enormously better, we continued our Walk through the village on a
pavement. When this ran out Joy of Joys! there was a path along the adjacent old
railway so we didn’t have to walk on the road any more. It was very pleasant — the rain had stopped
temporarily and it was lovely to walk through the trees. (We were too quick for the midges!) I was pleased we hadn’t given in and caught
the bus.
After about a mile we came to Oban
Airport (which is very
small) and there we got confused. We
couldn’t see where the cycle path continued. We passed an ‘MOD property — keep out’
notice, and Colin went blundering on in his pig-headed way, not listening to
reason at all. (Perhaps he was cold, wet
and tired too.) Inevitably we ended up
at a dead end, in a disused quarry actually.
Having established there was no way out except to climb the vertical
quarry walls — this always takes a long time with Colin when he is thwarted —
we retraced our steps and eventually found the cycle path we were looking for.
This led us to Connel
Bridge, another metal
wonder of engineering. This bridge
crosses the mouth of Loch Etive which flows down from Glencoe. It was very wet and windy crossing it up high
and out in the open like that! We did it
as quickly as we could (isn’t it supposed to be Summer?) trying to take photos
of the view on the way. I was ahead of
Colin, and found a path which took us down underneath so we could photograph
the whole bridge from there.
Bonawe
Ironworks
About seven miles inland along the
southern shore of
Loch Etive lie the
remains of Bonawe Ironworks. (We didn’t
have to visit it because it is more than a mile from the coast, but we did on a
very wet day in September because we thought it might be interesting. It wasn’t.)
This ironworks opened in 1753 and
closed in 1876, more than a hundred years ago.
It boasts it is the most complete charcoal-fired ironworks in Britain, but we
were struck by the fact that there is so very little of it left. It seemed to be a series of empty sheds, and
we had to use our imaginations a lot! It
produced mainly pig-iron, and is proud of the fact that it made numerous
cannonballs during the Napoleonic Wars.
Most of the workers were charcoal-burners, using wood from the surrounding
forests. Only a handful of men worked
the furnaces.
We were not terribly impressed — perhaps
because it rained non-stop throughout our visit, and perhaps because a mere six
weeks previously I had visited Blaenavon Ironworks in Wales. (They are huge, and very well preserved — but not charcoal-fired.) I was not interested in reading about blast
furnaces because I have seen one tapped — in Consett in 1965. And because I taught the workings of the
blast furnace over and over again for the sixteen years I worked at Bognor Regis
Comprehensive School. My shoes leaked, my socks got wet, and I
couldn’t drag Colin away from reading every single word on every single display
board. God! I was miserable!
I did take three photos of our
visit despite the rain, but somehow they got lost. I must have deleted them accidentally.
After Connel
Bridge we continued
south. We had a brief respite from the
traffic along a loop called ‘Old
Shore Road’, but after that it was dodge-the-traffic-in-the-rain
for at least two miles. It is a very
busy road, and the traffic is so fast! It was HORRIBLE!
Dunstaffnage Castle
We bypassed Dunstaffnage Castle
on that stretch of road because the lane that leads to it is a dead end. But it is right on the coast, so we did visit
it later on in September. It was the
same wet day we went to the ironworks, but the rain just about held off while
we visited the ruins.
Hailed as ‘The Mighty Stronghold of
the MacDougalls’, the castle was built in the thirteenth century to guard the
seaward approach from the Firth of Lorn to the Pass of Brander. Other claims to fame are that it was captured
by Robert the Bruce in 1309, and that it became the temporary prison of Flora
MacDonald in 1746.
Today the castle overlooks a marina
full of leisure yachts — such is the changing of times! There is no roof over
anything, but some of the walls have stood the test of time. We found a ‘floating’ fireplace and a skull
and crossbones. I managed to take a few
pictures before the rain teemed down again.
We sat in a bus shelter above Dunbeg to eat our apples. There was no cycle path notice from the main
road there leading us into the village, but we learned later that there should
have been. So we carried on down the
main road. Our only saving grace was
that from there on there was a pavement all the way to Oban, so we didn’t have
to traffic-dodge any more. We were
following our brand-new-very-expensive Ordnance Survey walking map which told
us there was a track leading off about a mile down the road which twisted its
way across the hills to Ganavan
Bay. But in reality that track did not exist! Once more the Ordnance Survey had let us
down! We could see the tarmacked
cycleway wending its way to Ganavan
Bay over there,
but between us and that track was a pathless swamp!
It was raining cats and dogs by then, coming down really hard. So we put into practice Additional Rule
no.14, and marched straight down into Oban.
The only photo I took (from under Colin’s umbrella) was of the cemetery
we passed — because it was so vast! On reaching the waterfront at Oban, we
marched straight through to the bus station, and thence to our car. We were wet, cold and miserable, but
we had made it!
That ended Walk no.260, we shall pick up Walk no.261
next time in the free car park near Oban bus station. It was twenty to seven, so the Walk had taken
us eight and three-quarter hours. We had
our tea and caramel shortcake, then returned to Barcaldine.
The next day we packed up and returned home to Malvern, taking two days
to do so.
Codicil
We both felt we had been ‘cheated’ out of the last part of the Walk into
Oban. We explored the village of Dunbeg
by car, and discovered where the cycleway left the village. There was absolutely no sign on the main road
directing us to it, and the Ordnance Survey map shows the beginning of that
track ending in a swamp a good half mile from the track leading down to Ganavan Bay.
So when we returned to the area in September we parked once more in Oban
and caught the bus to Dunbeg, alighting at the very bus stop where we had
sheltered to eat our apples. It was a
glorious sunny day, and we felt much more buoyant than we had on the original
Walk.
Down in the village a notice on the gate warned us of steep gradients,
but the whole cycleway was tarmacked so that didn’t hold any fears for us.
We passed some Highland cows as the path
twisted and turned past the swamp, through the hills, and ended up in a sports’
ground by Ganavan
Bay.
There is a nice beach down there, the first we had passed for ages.
Also quite a bit of new-build — some under
scaffolding but a whole row finished and lived-in. We didn’t like them much, we thought they
looked too stark and white.
There is
also an RAF memorial stone just above the beach. There must have been RAF activity here during
the War.
We now had a road to follow, all the way along the coast to Oban. We caught glimpses of the sea through the
trees, and looked back at the cliffs we hadn’t walked over because there was no
path.
We could see islands further out,
and a lighthouse shimmering on one of them.
We passed a tent on a piece of derelict land — a bit of wild camping
there! (I’m glad we no longer sleep in a
tent — the caravan is warm, comfortable and has an indoor toilet!)
High on the cliff lies Dunollie
Castle, an ivy-clad ruin
these days. There has been a fort on the
site since the 6th century, but the castle wasn’t built until the 13th. It was owned and lived in by the MacDougall
clan who still own the site. The family
moved out into a nearby manor house in the 18th century. Apparently the Gaelic language was first
brought to shore at this point — the present day Scots, of course, originally
hailed from Ireland routing
the original inhabitants of Scotland,
the Picts (Painted Ones). Hence the
Scottish Gallic and Irish Gaelic are very similar languages. Whatever happened to the Picts?
Another thing of interest about this place is that the passage between
the mainland and the island of Kerrera is narrow and fairly shallow by Dunollie Castle.
In the time of cattle droving the poor cows were ferried from Mull to Kerrera, and then forced to swim from Kerrera to
the mainland, landing on this point.
“Those that survived” (!) were driven on to markets in Falkirk, Stirling and Crieff.
Then there is the ‘Dog Stone’, a big lump of conglomerate dumped here
more than 400million years ago, then shaped by the freezing and thawing actions
of the last Ice Age. No!
The true explanation for this
extraordinary stone is that the ancient heroic warrior of Celtic mythology,
Fionn MacCumhail (Fingal), used to chain his massive dog, Bran, to this
stone. As the desperate animal circled
and struggled to free itself, it wore a groove around the rock with its
colossal chain. On a wild and windy
night you can still hear its ghostly howls……
And so we walked on to Oban
itself, past a low-light lighthouse and the town War Memorial.
We tried to get into the Catholic Cathedral,
built only in the 1930s, but it was closed for refurbishment. We carried on into this very pretty ferry
port which was bathed in glorious sunshine that afternoon. We have visited Oban several times before,
but that was the first and only time the sky wasn’t slate-grey with rain
teeming down in stair-rods. Sunshine
quite transformed the place!
We were pleased we had been able to walk the correct coastal route from
Dunbeg to Oban, even if we did have to do it out of sync. We blame the Ordnance Survey entirely for
that — GET YOUR MAPS UP TO DATE!
No comments:
Post a Comment