We can't leave this place without going on a walk to the castle ruins...
Down the lane. Thankfully less muddy yet muddy none the less.
Through the woods. Some of them look exactly like the dark forest in the Harry Potter movies.
Over the burn bridge, this time on foot noting how the boards look questionable. Reminding self to drive over them quickly. No pausing to hear a crack.
Rock walls in the barn yard covered in life.
Across the paved road and towards the castle/loch.
Up to the fortress...carefully.
The heathens have breached the gate!
Proof that he does, indeed, come outside every once in a while.
Inside the ruins, evidence of how the structure was built, including supports and grooves for floor structures.
Nature trumps manly pursuits.
Built in 1240...almost 800 years ago...Thinking about the souls that have stood looking out this window.
View from the ruins out at Loch Awe.
On this trip, we laughed at how many pictures we took of "nature" and how few we took of the towns and the people. I guess our normal life involves an overload of the latter and so we were obsessed with the former. There is, in fact, plenty of fascinating "nature" in the desert, but in the city there is less. And we are as guilty as normal about not being explorers in our own backyard. I loved the trips we took when we first got here, and we need to go back to the Arabian Gulf shore.
Every window in the cottage had a spectacular view. At the top of the stairs were two windows that opened like hatches out of the roof, which was good because when it was raining, the window then shielded your head. I liked to just stand and listen to the absolute silence enhanced only by the often constant breeze. It was so quiet on this hill that at night my ears would ring very very loudly. Coming from a place where noise--the roar of traffic, the blowing of the air conditioner, the vocal stylings of the bird--is relentess, this level of ringing silence was heavenly.
So one morning I was standing at the top of the stairs with the window open, listening to the breeze when I witnessed this act of courageous and inspirational accomplishment:
And I figured, if Gilgamesh can climb a hill, then why can't we?
Thanks to the eldest boychild, I had waterproof walking boots. Especially since one of my two pairs of shoes and two of my three pairs of pants were caked in mud and the washing machine did not work. So the younger two, Your Correspondent, and I gathered ourselves up and set out to conquer the moors.
One of the cool things about heather is that when it dies, it forms a ground cover of a sort of mesh on top of the sogginess. So if you step on red clumps of heather, your feet don't sink into the mud. As we left, I wondered which of the smaller two would be the one to either tumble down the hill or fall into the mud...
So up the hill we went. Judging from the bottom, the climb to the top looked rather treacherous, especially for us flatlanders. In fact, that fence over to the left was a big help at certain points, to keep my footing or balance.
Growing up around Texas ranches also helped me make sure that I grabbed the fence in between the nice sharp barbs rather than right on top of them.
The kids scrambled up the hill just like kids are expected to do, while the two elders plodded along. We've been walking some around the compound loop this fall, and I was so proud that we made it to the top here, that as I took the last few steps, I exclaimed loudly, "Well, that was a lot quicker and frankly a lot easier than I expected!" At which point, Your Correspondent pointed out that, indeed, we had only just scaled the first of about six big hills we had to climb.
That's called a "limited perspective."
As we climbed higher, we came upon several sheep carcases. Some poor Gilgameshes had not been successful in their epic battles, and I found myself really wondering what was lurking up here in the dark. [Aunt Julia! We really contemplated trying to bring you back this sheep skull for your art projects, but then we couldn't really fathom how we might explain that at airport security...leftovers from dinner?]
The top left photo above is of Finchairn Castle ruins.
And you know I cannot resist posting one two more panoramas from this walk:
View from the top of the walk. Lots more moors to explore.
The ground was like a saturated sponge, and if you stepped in the mud, you might get your shoe pulled off of your foot. As you can imagine, we don't travel with "wellies" since we live the desert...but here's a wonderful thing about having a growing 14 year old: his feet are bigger than yours. So when he remembers to bring his "snow boots" (fleece lined rubber lace-ups), you can borrow them from him for a walk in the woods. Your Correspondent is always prepared and so had appropriate footwear with him.
Thanks to Hank's boots, we had a lovely walk through the woods during a pause in the rain...
Appropriately attired for walking in the country.
Looking back towards the cottage (just out of the shot to the left).
Lots of rain = litte streams everywhere and very full burns!
Somehow this reminded me of the Texas hill country.
A landscape full of Christmas tree forests.
Fuzzy headed and no make up. Like a bear in the woods.
Heading back towards the road from the cottage is this muddy track through the sheep field. On one of our outings, we inadvertently spooked this sheep into cornering herself at the gate. She made a fierce opponent as we crept forward, climbing up on the only rock along the way to improve her vantage point for attack.
Finally, after copious pooping and a defiant bawling, she ran past us in a fury of flying downy white puffs. We decided she had faced down the big silver beast and was on her way to tell her friends about the epic victory. As the week wore on, several of her sisters looked at us accusingly...
We called her Gilgamesh.
And since they all looked the same, we called them all Gilgamesh.
Our cottage was on the western coast of Scotland, south of Oban. After arriving in the dark, muddy night after the stress of our diving and directional adventure, we woke up the next morning to one of the most amazing views I have ever seen. We were on the side of a heather and grass-covered moor dotted with sheep. At our feet was Loch Awe, a long skinny lake that sometimes looks bluish and sometimes is almost black. Just beyond a clump of trees in the center of the view were the ruins of Finchairn Castle.
This is what we looked like.
Inside we had a nice wood-burning fireplace, but the best place to be was on the sun porch. It rained most of the time--generally drizzling but occasionally a downpour--although on Christmas day the blue sky did make a glorious appearance.
Being here made me think of Georgia O'Keefe and her mountain/desert paintings. The landscape was smears of color, and as the light changed from dark to milder to mild and back to dark, the colors of everything around us changed. It was truly magic.
Here are five panoramas, taken at different times of day and different states of cloudy. Notice how different the colors look. Every time I walked out onto the porch, I got a fresh feeling of amazement at how gorgeous this place is. This is a selection of what we saw...
