Month: August 2011

We arrived on Skye late in he afternoon  The weather was not kind, cloudy, rainy and somewhat cold for a Queenslander. I found directions to Glenmore, which was where my great great grandfather Murdoch Nicholson and his wife Marion McInnes were born in 1835 and 1830. The road led up into the mountains then along the ridge to a collection of mostly modern houses with the odd stone ruin and wall amongst them. On the slopes below was evidence of paddocks divided by walls, now overgrown with grass where he would have tended the sheep as a shepherd. The wind was blowing fiercely and it was cold and wet and a long way from anywhere. I read how the tenants clawed at the ground and howled in despair when they were evicted and their crofts demolished so they were inhabitable. It was a miserable place today and I imagined how it must have been for them to lose everything they had and be travelling to a strange land where the sun shone. I pulled up and spoke to a lady who lived at one of the houses at Glenmore. She said on a good day you can see all over Skye from Glenmore, to the mountains in the south to the ocean in the west. There were ghosts here.

 

Some would have stopped but we drove straight past Turnbury and Troon golf courses and numerous others on the road to Oban. We were fortunate to have some fine sunny weather when we were on the coast near Girvan. Sharon’s ancestors were from there once but when we walked through the old cemetery, the only thing of interest were headstones with carvings of the skull and crossbones on them. “Rrrrr me hearties! Was they pirates?”

The National Trust card helped us with free entry to Culzean Castle which was good enough to pay the 24 pounds, but we were glad we didn’t have to all the same.Got to Loch Lomand by late afternoon and booked a B & B at Arrochar. When the sparrows woke me up with their familiar singing in the morning, I took a stroll along the lake but a half an hour was enough in the pre-dawn light. “Hoots mun, It was cold!”

The drive through the mountains along the lakes and through the forests to Oban on the west coast was not bad at all. The port here is full of fishing boats, big and small and is quite lively. Kids are back at school and are walking the streets in their school uniforms which makes me happy I’m only seeing them in the street and not in my classroom. How many weeks till we go back to work?

One of our last nights out at the Festival was a pub crawl but because it was a literary pub crawl about the greats of Scottish literature who lived in Edinburgh, we felt that the education cancelled out the alcohol we had at each pub stop. The pubs we visited were the ones where Robbie Burns, Walter Scott and the like got their “inspiration”. It was a good night out, funny stories by the two actors and good company. Edinburgh was great but I have to say I’m a little glad to be gone. I’m not sure how much longer we could have held out, day and night. We drove south-west today to Auchinleck where Sharon’s ancestors, the Boswells, had their house and after winding along country roads for an hour, found the house up a lane, over a stone bridge. All very impressive. Will head to the west coast tomorrow and head north.