News from Nowhere

We didn't go walking yesterday: the forecast was that rain would come in from the west and hit us early in the afternoon, so although the morning was bright, we decided we wouldn't risk being rained off again. Instead we spent the morning in the garden - a steep downhill slope which has been reclaimed by brambles and elder saplings. After the first couple of hours, I thought that the only way to measure what we had achieved would be by the half dozen sacks of garden waste piled up ready to go to the tip; but after another hour, several small trees had been uprooted, and clear patches of earth were visible. Today we are scratched, stiff but reasonably satisfied with progress.

But that's not very interesting, so let's have another post from Antrim, since I've just found this draft tucked away in a folder of photos of our first day at Whiskey Cottage. Our nearest town was Bushmills, so that's where we went to look for a newspaper. Despite the familiarity of the name, the town itself isn't large, and it's an odd mix (not atypical in that, as we were learning). Substantial buildings stand derelict, while buiding progresses everywhere. Many shops are boarded up, but there are also several craft / gift shops to appeal to the tourists, and some of the individual shops that are vanishing from English High Streets: two butchers, a choice of hardware shops, an excellent secondhand bookshop. People are friendly, and ready to chat, but the police station is surrounded by a high wire fence (behind which posters promote all the familiar community police initiatives) and bristles with cameras.

Despite being the week before Easter, there didn't seem to be many tourists about. We shared our tour of the distillery with three young women from Manchester; the old distillery buildings now seem mostly to be used for visitor services, while the whiskey is produced (from grain to glass, our guide told us, although we weren't shown the malting process) in anonymous new hangars by staff in high-visibility yellow waistcoats with 'Diageo Old Bushmills' on the back. The important fact about Bushmills, it seems, is that it isn't exposed to smoky air (the word 'peat' was not used - perhaps it's too technical?), and is in any case distilled three times, so the flavour is very pure. This was repeated several times, though the corollary 'not like that Scottish stuff that you don't like because it tastes of something' remained implicit.

We lunched at the Bushmills Inn, which is the big fancy hotel but despite that perfectly pleasant, with good burgers and friendly staff. After lunch we wandered off to investigate the tower we'd been seeing from the window, and realised that this, too, was part of the hotel, which extended further back than you'd think possible, along the river (and maybe just a bit too close to the sewage works).

We had had thoughts of returning to Bushmills by means of the railway / tram which shuttles from the town to the Causeway, but this doesn't start running until Easter - as I said, despite the apparent reliance on tourism, this was evidently not the season.

So we went to Dunluce Castle, and prowled around the ruins perched spectacularly on two separate cliff tops - not including the kitchen, half of which had fallen off the clifftop one stormy night in the seventeenth (I think) century. The information boards explained that the then wife of the owner had always hated the sea, and after this she refused ever to live in the castle again; the tone of the account made it sound not exactly unreasonable, but as if it took something like a pre-existing prejudice against the sea to explain why you would move out of a perfectly good castle.

We stated well away from edges, and took lots of photos (of which this is only the first) and enjoyed the atmospheric effect of the hazy weather until the rain drove us home again.

...now that Wigtown's here.

We are taking a week's break in Ireland, and naturally the start of our holiday is marked by a downturn in the weather.

It started out seasonal enough: blowy, not warm, changeable, showers and pale sunshine, sometimes at the same time, and plenty of roadworks, because in the spring the Council's fancy notoriously turns to...

There are great swathes of daffodils all along the roadsides, and cowslips thick enough to cast a net of gold over the banks. We followed the Tyne valley through the lush green country and up onto the bleak high ground, then down the other side into rich farmland again in Cumbria. We lunched at an enormous garden centre near Carlisle (out of curiosity, mainly, I chose for my dessert something that looked like a caramel slice, but with a layer of something white instead of the caramel, which I hoped wouldn't be marshmallow. It turned out to be peppermint - durham_rambler attributes this to the proximity of Kendal - and very nice, though more peppermint cream than I could actually eat). As we set off again, it was just starting to rain steadily, and carried on raining more and more heavily as we drove north into Scotland and west, softening the already soft green curves of the landscape, casting a grey haze on the silver gleam of the Solway coast.

We are overnighting in Wigtown, not just because it is Scotland's book town; it's also well positioned for tomorrow morning's ferry. But since we are here, and the rain has stopped, we have been into town, which has some fine buildings (though they don't look their best in the cold grey light), many of them full of books. Of which I bought a mere seven (well, we had less than a couple of hours before closing time), including James White's Ambulance Ship, which I haven't read, Charmed Life, because my copy seems to have gone missing, and David Ker's The Boy-Slave in Bokhara (decorated cover, rather tatty) because really, how not?