. ON YOUR ISLES OR YOUR ELBOW Next   Eight days by wiggly ways from Campbeltown to Lochinver.    SCOTLAND'S WEST COAST, SEPTEMBER 2004     After a gloomy start, five days of glorious weather! And that's five more than most travellers in Scotland would dare to expect.       6289 - the number of islands in Britain.                 11,000 - the distance in miles around the British coastline,   (equivalent to a flight to Australia).       Home, Glasgow, Carradale   Saturday 040904: About 12.30pm, only as I shut the front door behind me, did I realise that my watch was on the bedroom floor. I turned half around and stopped. It was hardly rebellious, I know, (Jo had a watch and there's a clock inside the van), but I still felt it was a positive freeing-up gesture to leave my watch behind. So I did. And for most of the holiday I very much missed, not the ability to find out the time, but the familiar weight of the thing on my wrist.     Imagine splitting the west side of Scotland into three areas:  Top left, Cape Wrath down to Ballachulish - "macho" Scotland, big mountains, constantly varying seascapes and assorted islands; Centre left, Ballachulish to Glasgow; Bottom left, Glasgow, the Clyde and down to the Solway Firth.   At the so-called planning stage sentimental Jo had suggested we follow the route of our first holiday together in Scotland, (No, it surely can't have been six years ago?), and because I'm no less sentimental we therefore agreed that the campsite in Glen Nevis would be our first stop.  But then I got around to thinking about  the 160 mile slog up to Glasgow,  through (and over) the city,  out past the airport to the Erskine Bridge,  all along the very long Loch Lomond  and over Rannoch Moor  and down Glencoe  and up Loch Linnhe to Fort William: 110 miles = 270 miles in total. So we decided we might try something different, which turned out to be 290 miles.   The place name Tarbert comes from two Gaelic words: tarruing, which means to draw or drag, and bata, (or batta), a boat. No wonder there are at least eight Tarberts or Tarbets in Scotland. At a Tarbert halfway along Loch Lomond we turned west and up towards Rest And Be Thankful.  Almost straight away we were distracted by a converted church advertising crafts, but selling only old-fashioned souvenirs of a type which might just possibly appeal to the elderly coach-bound tourist with limited imagination. We saw nothing to excite our interest, (and thank goodness for that, after such a slating). But the coffee and cakes were good.  We sat outside in the sunshine and tried not to notice low cloud heaving gently around the hills to the west. Such is the reliance I now place on an Indian summer, that for months before this holiday I'd been telling everyone, or anyone who'd listen, that we'd be spending part of September in a heat wave on the west coast of Scotland.

We'd gone over the top of the pass before I properly realised it and were soon heading down Glen Kinglas on one of the very longest straightest roads in Scotland. My dad remembers cycling down it with a fixed wheel set-up, (though why anyone, other than he, would use a fixed wheel on Scotland's mountain roads I can't imagine).

At Lochgilhead we crossed the Crinan Canal. I'd forgotten that it even existed and it was a great surprise to see a canal in such an unlikely location.

The Crinan Canal runs from Ardrishaig on Loch Fyne nine miles to Crinan on the Sound of Jura. It was intended, by avoiding the southern end of the Kintyre peninsula, to provide a quick link from the Clyde estuary out to the west coast and islands. 

Work started in 1794 and the canal was opened in 1801, two years late, significantly over-budget and not properly finished. In 1816, after problems with water levels and collapsing locks, Thomas Telford was asked to improve it. In the 1930s Telford's locks were reconstructed and deepened. The canal became the responsibility of British Waterways in 1962.

In the nine miles from Ardrishaig to Crinan there are 15 locks and the canal reaches a height of 65 feet above sea level. Every time a boat goes through the locks about 300,000 litres of water are used. No fewer than seven reservoirs feed the summit reach to ensure that the Crinan Canal does not run dry.

In its early days the canal formed a vital link in Scotland's transport system and before railways the fastest way to travel between Glasgow and Inverness was by steamer using the Crinan Canal and the Caledonian Canal.

Here's one very good thing about the web: On 041104 I received a mail from good friend, Charlie Moore in Edinburgh, the same Charlie Moore from Tretower whom, prior to 2004, I'd last seen in 1974!  "Really enjoyed this Scots Odyssey, dude. Lots of memories here. At the Ardrishaig end of the Crinan from Lochgilphead you can see the original Vital Spark (as in Para Handy) rusting away as if it never really mattered. And these "puffers" really did matter to the economy of Western Scotland. You'll find that the width of the Crinan is exactly the width of a puffer plus about 6" either side." I'm so glad Charlie mentioned this.  Click that puffer for clues.

In Ardrishaig I phoned ahead. 

"We'll see you in about three hours". 

"What he doesn't realise, Jo, is that we are in an immensely powerful 1.6 turbo-diesel VW campervan".

There's a vast amount of Scotland in that Centre Left area which I'd ignored for years, or never visited at all. By Ardrishaig on the A83 along Loch Fyne I was realising that we were about to mess up my three-section plan of western Scotland, because once south of the solid looking town of Tarbert, (2nd), we were already further south than Glasgow, i.e. into the Bottom Left.

By West Tarbert we were still further south (and west) and had crossed a low watershed to another sealoch, the (curiously named) West Loch Tarbert. 

Coming up on the map was a small place called White House and another called Red House. Boy, was I looking forward to composing a photograph of our reddish van next to a sign and with a caption, "There's a red house over yonder, that's where my baby stays.......," but, damn me, as we drove into the tiny hamlet of Red House there was no road sign to support its name. Nor was there on the south side, as we found out next day.

Taking advantage of a route on which caravan towing is discouraged, we headed east up a single track road at the top of which we had the most fabulous, misty, mysterious view of the great big, (as in, much bigger than I'd expected), mountains on Arran. On the map Arran looks a fabulous place, plastered with prehistory and screaming out for us to visit it.

Carradale, Campbeltown, Kilmartin, Oban, Ballachulish, Resipole.

Sunday 050904: Down to Campbeltown we went on a road even more steeply humpsome than that on which we'd arrived at Carradale. Towing a caravan along it must be quite interesting.

OK, OK, I know it was a Sunday morning, but Campbeltown looked just as dead as any town could ever look. Big, solid, stony, stern architecture surrounded the port, though the sidestreets seemed a little less harsh. Someone had recently told us about a TV documentary describing the relative misery of Campbeltown's teenagers who grow up near to the end of a long peninsula and a four hour bus trip away from Glasgow. 

We didn't stop. 

Across at Westport the Atlantic, restricted by not very much at all, whooshed onto a huge sandy beach. Despite our empty J-bars, we parked amidst the surfers. While Jo prepared breakfast I watched a surfer's skinny girlfriend with curiously dyed hair and dressed in an odd mixture of camouflage and surfing gear. She very, very thoroughly checked her little car's oil and water levels and I guessed that she was simply passing time while her unseen hero rode the waves. 

The smell of burning pig's bottom drifted over from two tents on the dunes. There were a couple of campervans on the car park, but it was evident that most of the thirty or so people on the beach had slept either in small cars or in borrowed-from-work vans, or else that morning had driven in from some long way off.

	We walked onto the very large and very clean sandy beach. And paddled. Across the Sound of Jura, through low cloud and drizzle, were the islands of Islay and Jura.  How different it was from France's Jura through which we'd travelled in May.
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As we drove away northwards up the A83 The Paps of Jura kept catching my eye, (well, you know how it is with paps, chaps). They very adequately compensated for the closer mainland scenery which reminded me of the backside of Lewis and also of the backside of the Isle of Wight, (and from this you may gather that it was, in parts, fairly featureless). Just look at The Paps on this though!

When you don't know an area well, it doesn't matter at all if in the space of two days you travel back up the same road. From the opposite angle you see much of what you missed the day before, don't you. 

Me: "Hey! How about that then?"

You: "How about what?"

Me: "Me writing all that stuff about us being in that area, and in gloomy weather too, and never once mentioning mist rolling in from........, nor the Mull of Kintyre".

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