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!