Exploring Glen Catacol

Arran’s mountains are amazing. When you first see Arran across the Clyde, the mountains look too impossibly big to be on an island. And when you first look up into Glen Sannox, the jagged mountain ridges look straight out of a Lord of the Rings film set.

Arran’s glens are awe-inspiring too. To the west of Lochranza you come to glacier-scoured, U-shaped Glen Catacol, home to golden eagles, adders and the unique Arran whitebeam trees. As you walk up the glen there is a powerful sense of natural forces sculpting the landscape here and now. Wherever you are you can hear water. The burn glides over flat granite rocks into pools descending to the Kilbrannan sound. As you head higher towards Loch Tanna, the landscape is almost reminiscent of the Alps with recent gorges carved out by heavy rain, clear water and white rocks. The most striking feature up here is the long slide of the burn and the giant Allt nan Calman waterfall plunging to join it. With its steep hillsides and lush climate, Arran is an island of waterfalls and the Allt nan Calman has to be one of the most spectacular.

Eventually you arrive at a broad, boulder strewn col overlooking the expanse of Loch Tanna. Routes from here lead to Coire Fhion Lochain, down to Loch Iorsa and Dougarie, or over Beinn Tarsuinn to Lochranza. It’s rocky and heathery terrain, but whichever route you decide to take you will be sure to have these wonderful mountains and glens at the north end of Arran all to yourself.

Loch Tanna and Glen Catacol is one of the routes offered on this September’s Arran Mountain Festival programme. Have a look at: www.arranmountainfestival.co.uk

Arran’s Flowers

Driving to Brodick can be a dangerous business, and I don’t mean because of the infamous potholes. The trouble is that the scenery’s so distractingly lovely that it’s positively hazardous. The other day it was the spectrum of colour on the roadside that snatched my attention, with red fuchsia, fiery montbretia, creamy lace meadowsweet, golden honeysuckle, and spires of purple loosestrife, all tumbling in luxuriant.disarray

The glorious vegetation of Arran can sometimes be overlooked because it’s easy to have close up encounters with wild creatures here, but there are not many parts of the British Isles where you are likely to find so much variety so easily; you can find me consulting my wildflowers book on most days. Seeing the common wildflowers in abundance is, for me, like meeting friends from my childhood, when they were often integrated in my outdoor games:-

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Ten Activities for Children with Flowers, Weeds or Grass

(Before intensive farming methods in many places made flowers less plentiful.)

1. Make daisy chain necklaces.

2. Test if someone likes butter. Hold a buttercup under their chin. If there is a reflected yellow glow (there always is!) they like butter.

3. Make rose petal scent by squashing them in a jam jar with some water.

4. Impress others by grasping a nettle in your bare hands. (Make sure it’s actually a deadnettle, but the other person doesn’t need to know that.)

5. If you get it wrong and get stung, find a dock leaf to rub on the sting and soothe it.

6. Tell the time with dandelion “clocks”. Every puff to blow the seeds away is equivalent to an hour.

6. Make grass squeal by holding a split blade between your thumbs and blowing hard.

7. Stick strands of chickweed onto someone else’s back secretly.

8. Have a battle with sticky burrs.

9. Pick some grass with dangly seeds then chant “Here’s a tree in summer, (show the grass) here’s a tree in winter, (push the seeds off between thumb and fingers and hold them like a bouquet), here’s a bunch of flowers, (throw the seeds in the air), here’s your April showers”.

10. Pick buttercups and daisies, clover and forget-me-nots, on the way to school so that your teacher can put them in a jam jar on her desk.

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Arran also has some fascinating areas of ancient woodland. It’s not widely known, but I learnt from Scottish Natural Heritage recently that the twisty, wind-swept oak woods on Arran’s west coast are truly rainforest: the Celtic rainforest. A high proportion of European mosses, liverworts, lichens and ferns can be found in these woods. In addition, the island is home to three types of unique whitebeam tree. So if otters and eagles are proving elusive, remember that Arran has lots of amazing wildlife that might be hidden away, but won’t hide from you.

Hefted

“Nigel, there’s a deer outside the window eating your canoe boot.”

Two years ago we would never have thought that this kind of remark would become the stuff of our everyday conversation. You certainly experience nature at close quarters when you come to Lochranza.

One evening last week Nigel and I went for a dip in the sea near Dougarie. The beach was covered with moon jellyfish waiting for the tide to rise. The water was warm and we swam in the reflections of the sunset.

Arran is such a natural paradise it is easy to understand why many Arran folk say that they are so strongly attached to the island that they cannot bear to leave it.

This made me think of the term “hefted” which is used in Northern England. It describes the way that sheep and cattle, which come from stock bred in the same area for generations, will stay in that place without fences and return instinctively to it. Maybe people can be hefted too.

The red deer of Lochranza must be hefted to the locality. They head up onto the hilltops at times but they are just keeping an eye on the place from higher up I suspect. Most summer days find them snoozing in some cool marshy spot on the golf course; most summer nights munching grass around the tents.

The hill sheep of Lochranza seem also to be hefted. After lambing, Sandy the farmer takes them off the golf course onto the open hills. One particular ewe though, along with her two lambs, is particularly attached to the golf course. She bleats pitifully when sent off and has many secret strategies to get back in, including sneaking in behind cars when campers arrive. She is instantly recognisable by her exotic set of four curving horns and she has taught us not to underestimate the brains of hill sheep.

Okay, it’s probably the juicy grass that bonds the deer and sheep to Lochranza, but who’s to say that they aren’t aware that, like us, they’re lucky creatures to be alive in a place like this?

An unhappy sheep- separated from the golf course.

Deer photos by Lance Ostler and Les Gibbon

Meeting the Neighbours: CalMac’s Five Ferries Ticket

Arran’s nearest neighbour is Kintyre- a long protective arm of land to the west- and it is mainland. At Lochranza we also look out over the Kilbrannan Sound to the Cowal peninsula, which is mainland too. On maps it looks like a fist of stubby fingers about to nip the Isle of Bute. However Bute is spared by the narrow channels of water around it that are named the Kyles of Bute.

Nigel and I have an ongoing debate about whether you can tell if you’re on the mainland or an island if you can’t see the sea. Cal Mac’s Five Ferries ticket was a means to explore this question as well as to get to know the neighbours.

The early ferry from Lochranza took us to Claonaig on Kintyre- an area marketed as “the mainland island” due to its atmosphere of remoteness and the fact that the sea is always in walking distance. But road signs show the mileage to Glasgow and remind you that you’re on the mainland and can travel in straight-ish lines instead of circles. Tarbert (where you catch the next ferry to Portavadie) has a lively atmosphere of comings, goings and passings through, with brightly painted houses round a busy harbour. West Loch Tarbert and East Loch Tarbert almost connect the Atlantic and Loch Fyne here, but a low rocky ridge remains firmly in place keeping Kintyre attached to mainland Scotland.

We stopped at Tigh-na-Bruaich on the pretty, wooded Cowal peninsula (marketing slogan: “Argyll’s Secret Coast”) and explored the Kyles of Bute in our kayaks. This is sailing country with boathouses of all shapes and sizes tucked in along a coastline of little rocky bays and islands.

The next ferry crossing from Colintraive involved a three storey vessel to Rhubodach on Bute. From mainland solitude we found ourselves in island bustle and urban traffic at Rothesay, which is like a little Glasgow afloat in the Clyde, with its stolid Victorian architecture making the moated medieval castle look small. The splendid Victorian toilets at the pier have won awards. However, Bute, like Kintyre and Arran, has contrasting east and west sides, and lonely beaches with views of Arran’s Sleeping Warrior mountain skyline weren’t far away.

Finally, the ticket took us to Wemyss Bay. We had enjoyed getting to know the neighbours and stopped in Largs for Italian icecreams at a ridiculously early hour, before heading homewards on the Ardrossan to Brodick crossing. As we drove up the coast to Lochranza we surveyed the now indistinguishable mix of long lochs, islands and mainland where we had just been. There was as little traffic on the Lochranza road as usual and certainly no traffic lights, no roundabouts, no white lines, no advertising hoardings- in fact nothing that reminded us of anywhere else.

I get excited about journeys on Calmac ferries and seeing different Scottish ports (sometimes just a slipway and a heated Portaloo!) but the distances we covered were not large and certainly do-able by sea kayak. Alternatively you can cycle or even walk the route using the ferries. Don’t hurry though- you’ll find a lot of unique places to explore along the way.

The photos show:

Tarbert

Kayaks in the Kyles of Bute

View of Arran from Bute

The Storm

Hard on the heels of my last blog about The Humming Tree, came the destructive face of nature in the shape of violent storm-force winds that bombarded West Scotland on May 23^rd. The trees, in full, lush summer leaf, suffered. At Lochranza, for most of the day, the gales funnelled down the loch from the north-west and and down Gleann Easan from the south-west , sounding like approaching express trains, and colliding on the golf course, whirling and gusting. Occasional explosions were the crashing down of trees. The deer lay as flat as hearthrugs, chins to the ground. If I see them behaving like that again I’ll know it’s time to worry about what’s heading over the Atlantic.

The trees which bore the full brunt of this battering are now brown and even bare from the burning salt spray. However, I am assured by Rab Logan from the Forestry Commission that they will compensate for this trauma by going into frantic seed production to ensure their future survival. And the blackened bracken will actually allow for more diverse new growth on the hillsides.

After a year of extreme winter temperatures, followed by an April that saw us outdoor swimming, then an unseasonally wild and windy May, I wonder how future historians will regard our time now? Are these just wobbles in the weather or the harbingers of significant climate change?

Better weather arrived for our Texas Scramble, sponsored by Arran Distillery, on the Bank Holiday.

Mr Dickie

It’s not good for business when a camper arrives at your door with an antler lodged in his stomach and blood pouring out.

This is Mr. Dickie, who tours in a beautiful Morgan, having a practical joke. The stags are losing their antlers and he had some tomato sauce. For a moment, we had a big fright!

Camping

For me, longings to go camping are for its simplicity: you eat, you sleep, and you carry on your journey. It’s all about hours passing whilst one pot meals come to the boil on the Trangia. It’s about going to bed when it gets dark, with the smell of earth and grass in your nostrils and ears alert to all the minute scufflings of small creatures around the tent. It’s about being snug in a sleeping bag as wind and rain give the tent a battering.

My first tent was a Vango Force Ten which endured twenty years of British mountain weather and even then would have kept going but I decided it was time for a new one. Meanwhile my Trangia is now 35 and still as good as new. It is therefore astonishing to me to find new camping gear in our dustbins on a regular basis, thrownaway because it’s wet or slightly damaged. Nigel and I usually fish them out however and now have an interesting collection of cast-off tents.

I miss going camping now I run a camping site all the summer season. The first time I came to Lochranza Campsite I was a visitor, about fifteen years ago. I remember unzipping the flysheet one morning to find three antlered heads looking down at me, tempted by the porridge in the dog’s bowl. So, nothing’s changed with the deer. The children made up a song called Rudolph the Greedy Red Deer set to the tune of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

You never know, one of these days you may well find me shaking the creases and musty smell out of our Vango Equinox and pitching it down by the burn, taking great pride in the careful selection of a level pitch and making sure I peg the flysheet out so that it’s completely taut and smooth. With summer nights approaching…. what could be better?

The Humming Tree

The great big campsite sycamore has become The Humming Tree again this spring with busy wild bees murmuring all day long in its leaves. It’s lovely to watch the faces of wonderment as people pass under it, which makes these lines from The Tempest come into my head:

"Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again…

Photo by Sarah Godfrey

Islands

I never get tired of examining the Cal Mac map of its Scottish Island Hopscotch routes. The names of the ferry ports rival the shipping forecast for poetry: Scalasaig, Castlebay, Eriskay, Stornaway, Berneray, Fishnish………

Britain is an island of course, but it doesn’t normally feel like it. Climb one of the mountains of Arran and you can see its edges all around you.

First-time visitors to the Isle of Arran appear to be driven by two compulsions. The first is to go round it (by one means or another) and the second is to climb to the highest bit (Goat Fell). This gives a reassuring sense of boundaries. I know because I did it too. These days, living on a small island, my mountain climbing is measured, not by Naismith’s Rule, but by the ferry to-ing and fro-ing down below: “Oh look, there’s the ferry coming,” I say, and a bit later “ There goes the ferry,” and a bit later “Oh no, not the ferry,” (aware of the embarrassing truth that I’m walking very slowly).

The main fact of life about islands is that you can get stuck on them.

Nigel and I got stuck on an uninhabited Scottish island once, on a sea-kayaking trip. Never assume that just because you’ve planned something it can’t go wrong- especially where the sea’s concerned. We had failed to understand that a force 5 or 6 forecast constitutes good weather in Northern Scotland. In the end we faced a choice between crossing choppy seas and being attacked repeatedly by great skuas, which flew at our heads with military precision. We decided that the sea was marginally less vicious, and fortunately lived to tell the tale.

So- living on an island is all about living with the knowledge that there are times when you can’t get off. And there are not only no 24 hour supermarkets on Arran but no food deliveries at all when the ferries don’t sail. The Sunday papers get to the village shop at Pirnmill about 12.30; which actually is a very good excuse for a long lie-in.

From Arran you can see lots of islands, small and big: Pladda, Ailsa Craig, the Cumbrae, Inchmarnock, Islay, Jura, Bute ... even Mull, all waiting in the sea suggesting all sorts of tempting possibilities. And that’s another thing…. in island life your most useful possession is a boat.

Scottish island in April. The water’s lovely!