News from Nowhere

On our first evening in Tarbert, we ate at the Starfish. It's the obvious choice: well recommended, inviting white exterior with blue shutters, local artwork on the walls, good seafood... Not cheap, but I'd happily have gone back there.

After spending the day in Skipness, we were back in Tarbert quite early. durham_rambler had had enough, but I didn't want to waste a minute of the last day of the holidaym so I went for one last walk round the harbour, one last inspection of the shop windows - there was some sort of promotion going on which included a competition for the shop window which best illustrated the theme 'space': lots of Star Wars models, some very fine planets, but why had the ships' chandler chosen to put three monkeys in their window? I had hoped to find the gallery listed as along this street, but instead took the steps up to the castle, which gave me some fine views over the town, took me through a belt of midges - only the second time of the trip when I was seriously bothered by them, and no more than an incentive to climb that little bit higher:



Steps led down the other side of the hill into woodland, and I was tempted, but it was time to return, and make plans for the evening. We decided to try the Anchorage Restaurant: the reviews were very mixed, but the positives were the sort of thing that appealed to us. The restaurant is next door to the Islay Frigate pub, and not as distinct from it visually as it should be: we had walked past without really noticing it.

Inside, it's a tiny space, with a bar at the back and the kitchen behind that. The décor is best described as 'quirky' and has too many fishing nets for my taste, but the general effect reminded me of a French family-run restaurant - except that it wasn't busy: in all the time we were there we saw three tables occupied, ourselves included. Yet it was reasonably priced - cheaper than the Starfish - and the food was terrific. My seabass with fennel risotto and smoked mussels had slices of fennel in a creamy golden sauce with telltale strands of saffron. The homemade soda bread was packed with flavour: I tasted cumin, caraway, seasame - the chef told us there were ten different seeds in it. The cheese plate (actually a cheese slate, set carefully on the slate table mat before me) held five Scottish cheeses: Highland Chief (cheddat-type with whisky), smoked cheddar, Dunsyre blue, a ripe and flavourful Brie and an organic goat's milk log, plus an assortment of oatcakes, chutney and a heap of walnuts. I complimented the chef on the walnuts: "Just lightly toasted." This attention to details made his cooking really special.

I had the opportunity to talk to the chef because as well as cooking he was waiting at table: he explained to us that the waitress had called in to let him know she couldn't make that evening, but he hadn't picked up the call until too late. Over breakfast the following morning we explained this to our host at the Knap Guest House: "Oh, he always says that. He hasn't got a waitress..."

Back when I was planning our Scottish holiday, I was looking for an overnight within easy reach of the ferry on our return from Islay, which would put us within a day's drive from home. Tarbert was the obvious place - not the Tarbert on Harris, which we visited last year, but Tarbert in Argyll (the name means 'isthmus' and tends to recur) - in fact it looked too good to rush away after a single overnight. Surely we weren't in that much hurry to be home? We booked ourselves two days in Tarbert, and spent the first one exploring northwards.

( Kilmartin Glen )

( The Crinan Canal )

Speaking - as we were - of seabirds, that boat trip to Ailsa Craig:

The trip - in a RIB, which is a Rigid Inflatable Boat - was certainly an experience, and I'm glad to have done it. It's quite a palaver, though. The boat is open, and goes fast, so they wrap you up in generous quantities of waterproofing, as much, I suspect, against the cold as against the wet. The overtrousers were a snug enough fit that I was not entirely confident that I would be able to sit down, but I wasn't called on to put that to the test: the saddle seats carry you as much standing as sitting. This is never exactly comfortable, and the two and a half-hour trip was close to my limit (I was quite surprised how quickly after disembarking I was walking more or less normally!).



Ailsa Craig is 18 miles out (if I've got that right) which is 40 or 50 minutes fast going each way. Outbound, particularly,we seemed to hit the waves head on, and I was reminded of riding lessons, and learning to rise to the trot. Once there, we made a leisurely circuit of the island - though just one way, and I was sitting on the 'wrong' side of the boat, so my view onshore was always obstructed (all my photographs feature a knitted hat, as worn by the lady between me and the island).



But the gannets didn't care, and soared above us in considerable numbers (though we didn't see them diving, as D. had from our cottage). The puffins were nothing like as numerous, and it feels rude to say "is that all you've got?", so I didn't like to ask whether their numbers are down here, as elsewhere, or whether the rocky island is not actually prime puffin habitat*. I did, all the same, see several puffins in flight, including one pair who did an obliging fly-past close to my side of the boat.

Puffins and gannets are clearly the A-list celebrities, and the birds our driver made much of. We also saw large numbers of guillemots (including at least one black guillemot which passed us when we had barely left Campeltown harbour), and I could hear the kittiwakes yelling 'kittiwake' from their cliffs, though I couldn't make out which of the carpet of white dots were kittiwakes and which were gannets**. Plus one or two razorbills, and a shag or so.

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*The internet suggests that although there are fewer puffins than other birds, their numbers are growing.

**Blowing my photos up as far as they'll go, I can see mostly gannets!

Getting up for the second time on the morning of the solstice observed, we set off for Campbeltown. But first we stopped at Saddell Abbey, a ruined abbey - two part walls in a pleasantly overgrown graveyard - in the care of Historic Scotland (though their care, as D. points out, does not extend to removing the sycamore seedlings from the masonry). But a small stone shed at the entrance shelters a collection of magnificent carved stones, full length effigies, decorative foliage, even a small mermaid. We saw more of these throughout our holiday, but these were our first, and we were greatly impressed.



I liked Campbeltown itself, too. My Lonely Planet guide describes it as 'blue collar' and suffering from the decline of its whisky and mining industries, but it has some fine old buildings: the cinema was undergoing restoration, and hidden behind boarding, but the Christian Institute (now council offices) was splendid, and the museum even better. Elegant houses front onto a little green, and cliff-like tenements have a classical severity.

That 'decline' has spared the town the invasion of the High Street chains, and there are some entertaining independents. We had arrived at Ferryman's Cottage to be greeted by a note from the housekeeper: "Sorry, your predecessors broke the kitchen scissors, and I don't have any in store," which was an excuse to visit Nickels'n'Dimes on the harbour front, where I bought a card of three pairs of scissors, a small knife and a lifetime supply of emery boards. A variety of kitchen wares were available in a choice of colours: we could have bought colour-coded kettles, toasters, cafetieres, breadbins, one for each member of the party, including valydiarosada's special pink. We resisted, and we didn't buy a CD player in the shape of an electric guitar, either.

On the advice of the Tourist Office ("I'm not allowed to make recommendations, but I can give you pointers") we lunched at the Bluebell Café. Despite the 'Business for Sale' sign, it was very busy (much busier than on our second visit two days later) and good. Also at the Tourist Office, I had picked up an irresistible (free) booklet about the museum: serious money had clearly gone into preparing this, and it contained excellent photographs of selected items (Hooray! It's available online!). Some of these had been chosen by the public at an open evening, and the descriptions included the remarks of local schoolchildren: a piece of rose quartz was "bling", and a penny-farthing bicycle was "very old" - this in a collection which included a neolithic jet necklace, and a beautifully polished axe-head in pale grey stone striped as if with a wood grain. One or two items from the booklet were mysteriously not on display, and I was sorry not to see the metal tags handed out to beggars in the nineteenth century, each bearing an identifying number which allowed the bearer to beg on one specified day of the week.

Behind the museum is a little garden, part of the original design of the building but now renamed the Lady Linda Macartney Memorial Garden. (We discussed that 'Lady Linda' but came to no conclusion*.) The bedding plants had obviously just been removed, presumably to be replaced with something else, and the statue of Linda sat a little forlorn among the bare earth beds. At the gate, a lady from the American tour group was asking their local driver, "Angus, has that song about the Mull of Kintyre been recorded?"

We drove on to the very south of the peninsula, to Southend, where the rocks are apparently popular with seals, though we only saw two, and where Saint Columba left his footprint in the rock, helped by a nineteenth century stone carver. Then round, on a narrow and winding road, to the Mull of Kintyre itself, the rocky headland from where we had views across to Antrim, and to Rathlin Island (been there! there were puffins!) and to the lighthouse, a mile down the steep road below us.

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*It's right, apparently: he was knighted in '97, she died in '98.

And we're home! Here's the last picture of the holiday:



taken at quarter to ten this morning, watching the little boats sail out of Tarbert Harbour, while we waited for the first of the day's three ferries. Technically this added another island to the trip's tally, but since we skidded across Bute from one ferry to the next without even stopping to visit Rothesay's Victorian toilets, it probably doesn't count.

Bedtime now; things to do tomorrow.

What do you do on Islay, on Sunday, when it's raining? No, that's a silly question: you can always visit a distillery - there are eight of them, and not all are open on Sunday, but some are. But if you visited a distillery on Saturday, plan to visit more on Monday, and would prefer to take a break from distilleries on Sunday, then what do you do?

( Well may you ask... )

We are in the Islay Hotel, in Port Ellen, and for the first time in four days I have wi-fi. Ferryman's Cottage, our house on the Kintyre peninsula, is one of a group of Landmark Trust properties strung along a private road round Saddell Bay. It is resolutely without internet access, making an old-fashioned virtue of it, and of its lack of television - we even had to bring our own radio on which to hear - and curse - the result of the referendum this morning. So there is catching up to do, about our four days at Saddell and about the weekend we spent on Arran en route. but first, the important thing, the solstice:

Almost the first thing we did when we arrived at Ferryman's Cottage was to walk back along the bay, past the Antony Gormley figure who stands alone gazing across the sea to Arran, as far as the bridge that crosses the stream by the little beach. Nowhere cried out demanding that we observe the sunrise there, right there, so there seemed no reason to do anything but step out of our front gate and cross the track to the shingle beach.

By the time we went to bed the sunny evening had clouded over, and we had little hope of seeing the sun clear the horizon, but we set the alarm anyway. Here in the very south of Scotland we were south of Lindisfarne, so the day is shorter, and west of just about everywhere, so the day is later - also west of Arran, so the horizon is higher, but you can't calculate for everything. If it comes to that, we may have been a day late, too: we were observing the dawn of the day after the longest day, but it couldn't be helped, and it was at least the dawn nearest to the moment of solstice...



Regardless. We got up, we dressed, we went out into the dawn. The sky was echoing with the shrill whistling of the oystercatchers, the air was still and the midges were malevolent. I walked up and down, but couldn't escape them. The moment of the dawn ticked over, and I could see a few faint streaks of light in the sky opposite the sunrise. My face was stinging with midges. Was I going to wait until the sun had failed to appear above the hills of Arran? I was not. The ritual had been observed, the sun had failed to appear, the days were getting shorter. I went inside, combed the midges out of my hair and went back to bed, leaving the curtains open so I could see across to Arran, and the sun still not rising - Until I fell asleep for several hours and was woken by the sun hot on my feet, ready for another day.