Playing Catch-up

Actual Date: 9 August 2008

The next few posts took place last weekish and well... not today, but I've been totally lazy about writing. Though, I have an excuse: we're moving in less than a week! So anyway...

We decided to partake in some of the Festival Season flair tonight by surveying the Free Scene. Much of the festival stuff costs upwards of $10 per person, and we're trying to save some money, so we've been trying to find free stuff to do. The Guilford Arms pub was hosting a Jazz Festival (I wish I had a footnote ability on here, but the "Fringe Festival" is really an umbrella term for a whole series of smaller fests featuring all kinds of acts that all book through the same office, for convenience and marketing's sake). So we head up to New Town. I took a couple of shots as the sun went down and the moon came up on our way there; not so bad for me and my point-and-shoot. We just didn't feel like hauling a real camera around that night.


I've aways been a fan of jazz, and sometimes it just gets too expensive to indulge, but this was really nice. Nice = free! The band was interesting, in that the lead singer was not the head of the band; this honour (like the extra letter?) went to the drummer. There was also a 2 clarinet players, one of which was the singer and another of which was also the sax player. Plus a very intensive banjo player that we had seen before during our interlude in the Grassmarket a couple of weeks ago. The atmosphere was quite nice, not quite jazz cellar (the Jazz Bar holds that designation), but the traditional oak bar holds some sway with the ambience. They played a whole slew of stuff, from dixie to New Orleans to more classy piano jazz done masterfully on drums and a clarinet.

On our way home, we stopped to catch the tail end of a free stand-up by an enthusiastic Yank and the Canon's Gate pub in their dank and totally retro basement.

The Balmoral Hotel at Night

A shot of the jazz players through the window... a little shaky because the camera is just a little point-and-shoot, and it doesn't do so well at night

Attack of the Jellyfish!

So today we brought our wet, mucky, midge-filled vacation to an end. It rained all night, and while our tent help up wonderfully as per usual, I did get eaten alive last night and am covered with perhaps hundreds of little itchy painful bites. I hate midgies.

But the mornings prove to be resiliently beautiful, so I can’t stay mad at the island while we pack up, and there is something delightful about seeing al the dead midgies that drowned in the water that collected in the upturned dish of my Frisbee. We get everything together and head out, planning to stop at the Brodick Castle before catching the ferry back to the mainland. The morning is warm and sunny, and there are some great woolen thunderheads peaking up around the sandstone walls of the fortress. It’s apparently still lived in, and the upkeep proves it. It’s surrounded by acres of beautiful gardens, which used to be free but now cost a pretty pence, though not as pretty as then pence needed to actually get IN to the castle. It’s a 12th century thing, give to the Lords of Hamilton in the early 1500s. But we spend time putzing around, catching a glimpse of a homely but apparently truly romantic Bavarian pine cottage, complete with the original fir cone roof built in 1845. It was built by one of the Lords of Hamilton for his wife, who missed Germany. I guess everybody has to like SOMETHING quirky and ugly. Most importantly, we spent time playing on the very fancy kids’ playground. It was irresistible, with multiple 2-story slides, which Jonmikel just had to try, soliciting advice from Dads in the area saying, “Oh tell him to watch his head (CLUNK as Jonmikel hits his head) and, “Oh he needs to watch his ankles going around those curves!” There was also what looked to me like a child’s ropes course, with al kind of ups and down and monkey bars and climbing and balancing thing that we could have spent hours on. With playgrounds like these, its no wonder British kids are smaller and in better shape than American kids!

We also stopped briefly at the Isle of Arran Brewery, just to look around and decide its too early for beer, before hiking back to the Arran Aromatics and Cheese Shop, where we wasted time waiting for the bus to the dock.

The best story of the day, though, involved a group of pre-teen boys at the dock. It looked like they had been there waaaay too long (the ferry was running late) and they were incredibly bored. One of them had gone off to buy some (what I though at first were) firecrackers. They actually turned out to be some kind of fun chemistry experiment that I’m sure my dad would have gotten a kick out of. They were little bags about the size of a pack of baseball cards, and when you broke the stuff inside, chemicals mixed and created gas, which expanded the bag until it burst loudly and with enough oomph to impress the kiddies. So at first they were throwing them at each other, and then, upon deciding that it was not nearly cool enough, went off to find things to try to explode. Like a beached (and most assuredly dead, for all you animal rights activists) jellyfish. They boys gathered around and spent a good 20 minutes trying to cautiously lift up the gelatinous beast, place a bag underneath it, and run away. But they were all kind of pansies, and none would get too close to the jellyfish, so they mostly missed. Eventually, though, they got one, and it exploded just as this boy, who had been relegated to “just watching” by his buddies for committing a party foul and moving an exploding bag just before it did its damage, was running up to needlessly adjust it in hopes of regaining status. With a dramatic **pop**, the thing exploded, a chunk landing right on the kids arm. Apparently, those things still sting post mortem, and the kid was covered in prickly goo. His friends though it was so hilarious, that he was returned his status on principle, though he had to remain the butt of every jellyfish joke for the next hour and a half on the ferry. If you had to spend time waiting for a late ferry, watching kids explode jellyfish on each other with things way more creative and safer than firecrackers, then this was the way to do it.

Me, hunting for Velociraptors among the dinosaur plants on Castle grounds...

This is one Jonmikel's, but I love the focus and the crispness... I think its a great shot!

This is one of the picturesque farmhouses next to our campground... I SO want to live here...

Fun with macro!

This sundial (in the gardens at Brodick Castle) was actually showing the correct time!

This is what happens when you're too big for the kids' table...

Ah, nights on the Isle or Arran. The silence of the mountains, the gurgle of creek, the plat plat of the light rain, the murmur of the LOUD DRUNK SCOTTISH MEN who decided to pitch camp right next to us and proceed to down a 24 pack of cheep-ass beer at 1:30 in the morning.

Of all the campgrounds, in all the towns, in all the world, they walk into ours (ouch! Painful cliché!).

But there they were, three good buddies from Glasgow (someone recognized their accents?!?!), drinking like fishes, yelling and screaming and laughing crudely and only getting worse when a polite, meek woman asked them to please keep it down. To top it off, they slept a sum total of 2 hours, getting up at sunrise to rip apart one tent, set the other one on fire, and who-knows-what-else to the last one. A night to remember. I can’t say that I currently have the highest opinion of Glasgow…

The destruction...

Regardless, we awake to another glorious, midge-free morning in Glen Rosa, minus, of course, the smell of burning synthetic tent material. Oh, and plus a timid little rainbow reflecting through the mountain clouds. On today’s docket: tombs and woods. We head out and stop on our way into town to take some photos of the nearby cemetery that, for approximately two minutes, was enjoying a layers of muted, foggy sunlight.

Graves at the nearby cemetery

We hopped a bus to the southern part of the Island, starting in Lagg, where the whole town consisted of a hotel and a closed-down, for-sale grocer all set into a delightful wood that was lush and green and approximately one hectare big. I love these little nooks! We stopped for lunch at the hotel before finding a wooded trail to the Torrylinn cairn, an old chambered tomb containing several burials that was very reminiscent of Ft. Ancient. Well, Ft. Ancient (back in Ohio) is probably a fair spot younger than Torrylinn, so perhaps it is reminiscent of these Arran sites. But it looked an awful lot like a mound that had been plowed over and through several times, which I suppose is about what happened. The main passageway was still visible and lined up with the big law stuck into the bay. Coincidence? Aesthetic preference? Island worship? The actual specs of the tomb are unknown, and the models they have for it actually come from another (assumed to be) similar tomb excavated elsewhere, which I find to be a bit of a gyp, considering they try to play the sketches off as genuine and don’t tell you otherwise until the fine print. Silly interpretation materials.

We also decided to make a large loop to check out Great Britain’s only official nude beach (a nook up the coast about a mile that was full of painful-looking rocks and devoid of anybody, minus some adventurous cows; not that it would get much use, as the weather seems perpetually too chilly and/or rainy to even THINK about getting a tan) and then to find yet another cairn. This one was a little more difficult to see and completely devoid of any development, upkeep, or interpretation. It was overgrown and surrounded by vicious-looking cows, so we kept our distance and admired from afar. We also once again took advantage of the British Right of Way laws and tramped along a private farm road to get back to the town to have a celebratory beer (old stuff deserves a good beer) and catch the bus to our next destination: the Glenashdale Falls.

Glenashdale Falls was, by far, the coolest hike we took. Not so much for the waterfall, which was neat but by Niagara standards, pretty… standard. But the wood! It was a genuine British Wood! I kept expected Robin Hood to run by, leaving us to get arrested by the Nottingham police as his accomplices. Every tree in Scotland is on purpose. The Celts and Romans and Anglo-Saxons made doubly sure that there would be no trees to stand in the way of world domination, and then rich white people proceeded, in the years that followed, to replant everything to their specifications. So every tree has a reason for being, or is the direct descendant of a tree that does. So this wood, nestled along the Ashdale Water, was all planted because some wealthy dude wanted a personal playground. My kind of life. You there, plant me a forest! Stock it with wildlife so that I may hunt!

Yeah. Anyway, it’s grown wild now, and is so thick in places that it feels like night even though it was sunny when we walked in. It’s beautiful and creepy and enchanted in the way you imagine it would be when you watch Beauty and the Beast when you were 5. Or 21, whatever. The ground is covered in a thick and bristly-soft cushion of decaying pine needles, and its possible to be 100% silent as you move in between tall pines. Light is so difficult to come by that all the branches from the trees below the canopy of shriveled up, and in any place were a sliver of light comes through the moss and mushrooms bloom with unprecedented gusto. Also located smack in the middle of this wood is an old “Iron Age” fort, overlooking the river and with a swell, and I’m sure strategic, vantage of the next hill over. I included “Iron Age” in quotations because as such, that age covered a whole heck of a long time, at least 1000 years spanning the BC/AD change-over. It could also mean either Roman or Celtic, and I’m not well-versed enough in stone fort architecture to make that call. But it was still pretty wild to think about what I was poking around, that it once had walls and paintings and shops and lighting and all kinds of things that would make it not at all what it looks like it would be from the crumbling walls. (If I were to ever pursue archaeology, it would totally be in experimental stuff, you know, rebuilding homes and recreating stone tools to use in modern surgeries… things like that)

After the fort, and a brief encounter with a hippie Icelandic family in which Mom and Dad obviously told the kids to go play while they toked up in the shadows of the Iron Age, we trucked back down the trail to Whiting Bay, where I fell in love with the town, the pub where we stopped for a beer and to wait for the bus back to Brodick, and with lawn bowling. My little American brain thinks that it is just the cutest little sport ever. And on the whole, and entire island of less than 5000 people sounds just about perfect….

Jonmikel Crossing the Torrylinn Water

Jonmikel heading into the Wood...

Jonmikel actually IN the Wood...

Glenashdale Falls

Lawn Bowling!

I should first apologize for the rushed essence of these entries. It’s difficult to be eloquent when you have pages upon pages of events to discuss, and I plan to be such when I actually sit down to write my ever-on-the-horizon travel novel. But in a blog, it’s always easier to make a small event into a poem, and leave the large happenings for a brisk ramble down the main highway of the English language.

Thus, I begin.

We made it through the night, me, barely so. I have never camped in the rain nestled within a blood-thirsty hoard of vampirous gnats tucked next to a creek prone to flash-flooding, so I spent the whole night with wide eyes and my blanket pulled to my chin in anticipation. When morning came, do did the sun, which the proceeded to boil the water around the tent, making a very passable sauna. So, we get up. Turns out, mornings in Glen Rosa are gorgeous, sunny and breezy and virtually midge-free because of this auspicious combination.

So after a brisk morning of face washing, chomping on Irish brown soda bread, and marveling at the stark contrasts between this moment and all of last night, we pack up some stuff for the day and make our way to the bus stop a mile or so down the road. As we hiked out of the campsite, a delightful lady who lived in one of the picturesque farmhouses on the road stopped to offer us a ride, which is totally fabulous. Something great about small towns and small islands with populations less than 5000… free rides! So we dropped us at the bus, and we hopped aboard for a journey west to find 6000-year-old standing stones in Machrie Moor.

After as much traveling as I’ve done, I’ve come to learn that the best way to get somewhere on a bus: ask the bus driver. The jolly gentleman informs us that we actually missed the best bus to get to the stones, but that he’ll drop us off at the entrance to Bridge Farm, where we could just cross the fields to get there. “It’s a bit marshy, though, so you better have good footwear.” And then he scoffed at Jonmikel’s Tivas, which, ironically, would prove to be the better choice for marshy crossings. Then he asked, almost as an afterthought, “Where ya from?” “The US.” Standard response. “Well, what part?” “Montana?” “Ahhh Cowboy country! This should be no problem!” From then on, we were emphatically known as “Montana Folk” by bus drivers. I guess they don’t get too many of us out this way.

After a cheery and scenic 20 minutes on the bus, the driver pulls to the side, calls out, “Hey Montana Folk!” We grab our stuff and head up front, where he proceeds to tell us that this is where we could get off, but that his bus turns north after his half-hour break in Blackwaterfoot (the end of the road for this service) and that he’d be more than happy to drop us off at the easy way, if we’d like. We reply that we’re looking for a morning adventure, to which he shakes his head in disbelief. “Well, here you are. You just head straight out that way,” a wave and a point in a general direction, “and you should see them soon. Just walk straight there.” We thank him and hop off.

One thing I’ll give the British: the UK Right of Way laws are pretty neat, if a bit freaky for my American-trained, Do Not Enter mind. You can pretty much walk anywhere as long as you don’t bother livestock or destroy structures. So we walk across somebody’s farm. Literally. I bah at the sheep and moo at the cows and think to myself, “I bet they hate tourists.” We stop and have a photoshoot of some old, rusty farm equipment in what little sun we can muster. We tramp over barbed-wire fences and through marshy ground and through what can honestly be called a swamp. (Insert clever Fire Swamp allusion here: No, we didn’t see any ROUSes, though I did almost have to be rescued from a pit of quicksand….) I get SOAKING wet, in my fancy hiking boots, and Jonmikel frolicked free in his Teva sandals… We even found a fabulous spot of bog that had formed a fairly solid layer of moss on top of a slimy layer of water. So what do we do? Oh yeah, we stand on the moss about 10 feet apart and I would jump up and down, and watch Jonmikel bounce up and down as I jumped, and then we’d switch. I kept thinking of my dad, and how much he would love the science of it all… ☺ It was pretty wild.

Then, after much trial and tribulation, we find ancient standing stones! Acres of them, surrounded by acres of stone circles and hut circles and postholes. The archaeologist in me quivered with excitement. As per usual, the interpretation of the site left much to be interpreted, especially for someone with archaeological training. I wanted to know exactly what evidence they had that people did or did not live here or if it was just a worship site; I wanted to see an actual excavation of a posthole, because I have no idea what a postmold would look like in a bog; I wanted to see what kind of tool kit they used here; I wanted to dig up the thousands of years of history that they predicted is buried under peat and marsh. But alas, I had to survive on just simple, layman’s explanations. But the site was pretty cool. It was HUGE, stretched from ocean to mountain, and contained an uncountable amount of stone henges and circles and the remains of wooden structures. I guess standing stones in Scotland are like castles in Ireland… everyone’s got one. We imagine them to be where Celts conducted sacrifices to the ancient gods of midgies.

Incidentally, the path we were supposed to take coming in was WAY easier than the path we actually took. Go figure. We head out and walk to Machrie, which is nothing more than a seaside golf course and a café. We have a while to go before the next bus shuffles by, so we stop for lunch and then lay out in the sun to air out my socks. When the bus comes, we flag it down (how cool and country-bumpkin is that??) and hope on, and (it being 12 minutes late) we miss our next connection to the South Island, so we putz around Blackwaterfoot for two hours. We stride along the beach, taking in the coy Scottish sunlight and poking at seaweed and beached jellyfish and playing in ruined sandcastles. There was a definite air of Holiday in this town, with things moving slowly and parents only half watching their children play in the sand and the ocean and the wind breezing through the beachside fields of grasses and grains and little yellow and purple flowers. There’s only one hotel in town, and only one real bar, and a slew of B&Bs and guest houses and self-catering places, creating a quaint, country atmosphere, a relaxing seaside getaway where al you do is nothing.

We catch the next and last bus that goes around the north of the island, and we pass through mountains and valleys and around waterfalls and harbors. It’s a beautiful ride, made queasy by the twists and turns and the suicidal driving style of the native bus driver. It’s made slightly worse, also, when we hit Lochranza, a popular destination as well as the home of the local Distillery, when hoards of people pile on the bus in order to reach the last ferry back to the mainland. They packed us on like slime eels in a barrel (OK, I saw that on Dirty Jobs once; it’s a pretty accurate description when you think of all the hiking and sweating people do in the island), and I was pretty sure the brakes on the bus were going to give out on the way down the hill, or at the very least we would bottom out and our numbers would be thinned by a gaping hole in the floor of the bus. But we all made it, and on time, too, and our numbers piled out and mish-moshed onto the ferry. As for Jonmikel and I, we headed to the local co-op to buy some meat-type items and a single-use grill (for only 5 pounds!); we planned to brave the midgies and cook outside. If nothing else, the grill proved to be worth its weight in gold for its ability to drive away the flying jaws with its woodsy smoke. A number of 20-something Eastern Europeans look ready to cry as they desperately try to sit outside and enjoy the nice weather. They, however, have a large, living-room sized tent, into which they can retreat and still have room to breath. We coat ourselves in smoke, burn a few wet branches to maintain a smoky film around our tent, and then snuggle into bed as the sun sets.

With the exception of the one of me, these are all some shots I took on that first full day... we had so many good ones....

A view of one of the Machrie Moor standing stones from an old farmhouse

Me trying to avoid midgies before our grill gets going

An exploration of old farm equipment

Dead Sheep!

I have a weird obsession with fungus...

Where's Jonmikel?

Jonmikel and the standing stone, sizing each other up before the rumble...

Escape to Arran

Story of the Day: We jump off the train in Glasgow. There are two stations, and we have to make the hike from Queen Street to Central, and we have to pick up a ground sheet for our tent. Apparently, it’s rainy in Scotland? Who knew… so we heft our packs, filled with tents and bedrolls and blankets, and make our way to an outdoor store. We ask for some kind of tarp, and the elderly Scottish gentleman begins to chat with us in one of the thickest brogues I have heard yet. We nod politely, and smile in standard “I know he’s speaking English but I have no idea what he’s saying” fashion. He’s joined by another, younger and more understandable, guy, who asks us where we’re headed. We reply “Arran Island,” and he nods and smiles and they both proceed to tell us how beautiful it is. “Except watch out for the weather. Not a few weeks back, a couple of campers had to airlifted out of their campsite because of flooding.”

Hard core, we decide. Duly warned, we nod our thanks, pay for our tarp, and head off.

A short train ride and a short ferry trip later (through the rain, already a bad sign), we arrive in Brodick. To skip a few here’s and there’s, we end up at Glen Rose, a gorgeous spot in between some small mountains at the foot of Goatfell, the tallest peak on the island. It’s green and lush and along a red-stained creek and only 7 pounds a night. Can’t beat that, at least not in Scotland. We hike around, picking apart, criticizing and listing the pros and cons of all the available spots, and finally pick one. We pitch the tent, decide the spot isn’t quite what we wanted, and move it a very strategic move, 3 feet to the left. There, perfect.

The guy who runs the site wanders up, in the company of his incredibly well-behaved sheepdog and a whole hoard of midgies (I’ll get into THOSE monsters later). He smiles, mentions the midgies and how we either need to start a fire or get drunk enough so we don’t care. Then he mentions, in an off hand kind of way, that we may want to move our tent. “It flooded up here last night, so you may want to be a bit more propped up. Two weeks ago, we had a couple camping right here, and they had to be airlifted out because they were stranded in flood waters." He wished us a cheery good day, whistled to his dog, who responded posthaste, and shuffled up the hill.

Leaving us a bit stunned. Here, we hear about silly campers being hauled off because of flooding, and in the acres upon acres of available land in this farm cum campground, we managed to find THE spot where those campers pitched their tent. You just can’t make this stuff up.


So we moved back to our original site, right next to the creek but hefted up quite a safe ways from it. Then we head back into town (Brodick, 2 miles down the road) to invest in some insect repellent and warm food. Luckily, I had just bought a fabulous and fabulously cheap rain jacket, which would prove to be invaluable in the days to come. Not luckily, the only thing resembling insect repellent in all of Brodick was Raid, with which, incidentally, we actually saw some people dousing themselves in a desperate and half-crazed attempt to avoid the midgies (if that gives you any idea how bad those things actually are). We bought some natural stuff that would prove to be a monumental waste of life. We also bought some fabulous food in a pub that was entirely filled with drinkers, snooker players, and community dogs, all of whom (the drinkers, snooker players AND dogs) seemed to know each other. A good local place, that made a mean crawfish curry. Seriously.

As we made our way back to camp in the light rain (that would only grow to torrential after we reached out tent, thankfully), we ran into a couple of guys waiting desperately for a bus nobody was sure was really supposed to come. They asked where we were from, noting cleverly that our accents were not Scottish. Boy #1 was from Columbus and Boy #2 was from Boston, and then it came out that they were on an Ohio University study abroad program. Shazaam! I busted out with an “Oh hey, I KNEW there were some of you here. You’re in Edinburgh right? Studying photography?” This totally floored them, if not kind of creeped them out. But I have been in touch with my former boss from when I myself worked at the Ohio University Office of Education Abroad, and I knew that there would be a group in Scotland this summer. I came back with a “Lori Lammert told me about your group.” Then they became totally impressed, as I explained who I was and that no, I wasn’t stalking them. I had been on the lookout in Edinburgh for them, which is where they were based, and would have never guessed that I’d meet some of them in the middle of the night in the rain on an island off the coast of Scotland. Isn’t it just a small world?

Raindrops dripping on the boat

Anchor chains on the Ferry to the Isle of Arran

Low Tide in Brodick

A tent that was destroyed and abandoned during the flash flooding the night before

Looking across the Brodick harbor to the mainland

Our campsite in Glen Rosa, during the morning sunshine the next morning

The Isle of Arran from the ferry. Brodick is to the left, and right where you have that V-shape between the mountains is where our campsite in Glen Rosa is. Pretty, huh?

Pre-Weekend

Before tackling the weekend on the Isle, I've managed to steel some photos from Jonmikel from our Water of Leith walk. We managed to get out last weekend and walk the 6 miles we had left to go. We started at the Visitor's Centre, explored the myriad of small displays mostly geared toward children, playied with a mini-watermill display, then headed out to enjoy the perfect weather. The river goes from the Firth of Forth all the way to the Pentlands, where it actually starts, so we headed out away from the city and ended the day in the Pentlands. It was warm, so we shared the road with walkers, joggers, swimmers, bicyclists and even an odd horseback rider. It made me extremely jealous, as I really miss horseback riding, especially on beautiful days.

Here are some shots I took while on the walk:

A dog playing in the river; he wasn't very smart and it always took him at east 5 minutes to find the stick in front of him.

Weekend in the Rain

OK, so I've just returned from a long weekend on the Isle of Arran... More to come, but I thought I'd send you a taster of what's in store:

This is the Isle of Arran from the ferry

This is the cool stuff we came here to see: 6,000 year old standing stones!

This is where we camped for the weekend... gorgeous, huh? But there's a catch... these little insects called midgies (I have yet to figure out what they REALLY are) swarm all around you at eat you alive. Seriously. I'll show you a picture of my back if you don't believe me....

Oh, and in case you were thinking about how pretty and sunny it is there, you're WRONG. It rained the entire weekend, with the exception of the couple of seconds it took to take these shots and, oh yeah, on the ferry ride back to the mainland. But we had a blast, and our tent holds up wonderfully in the rain!