In which I stand in a Colosseum-like tower to watch ferries far below, make a personal pilgrimage in something of a literal sense, visit a place that has tried to kill me no fewer than three times in the past, and drink in one of my favourite views on planet Earth. Oh, I also spy the retirement cottage I want but can never have…

Failte B&B is a gorgeous little Bed & Breakfast, and our host, Thomas, is both delightful and very attentive. Wonderful accent combo too: of German origins, grew up in Namibia, worked in South Africa, then moved to Scotland. And you can hear all of it through the dominant German accent. The only thing that’s a little weird about the B&B is that the place is absolutely pristine: so much so that I’m finding myself tidying up behind myself as I go. Not that there’s anything wrong with being clean and tidy (and most good B&B’s are), but it’s just a wee bittie like visiting your grannie’s place. Still, lovely house. Oh, and we learned that Thomas’ wife and son painted a lot of the portraiture around the house, and his daughter created the artistic tabletops, coaster, etc. Quite the talented family.

 

Today was not going to be a heavy whisky day – technically, we have nothing whisky related on the itinerary, but, I mean it’s John and me so we’ll certainly not go thirsty – so I opted for a breakfast that wasn’t the Full Scottish. Today’s culinary delight was Eggs Royale: two runny eggs on top of smoked salmon on top of tattie scones, drizzled with hollandaise sauce and paprika. And I’m fairly certain that the eggs were duck eggs. Yeah, OK, let’s try not to get too used to that. Wow. It was light and rich and indulgent all at the same time. Delicious.

Despite the weather forecast promising rain all day, it was slightly sunny, mostly overcast, but dry and still. Of course, this is Scotland – wait five mins and it’ll be howling gales and horizontal rain, with bright rays of sunshine just to confuse the hell out of you. But, no, five mins later it was still slightly sunny, mostly overcast, but dry and still. Scottish weather has found a new way to screw with us: decades of setting expectations of massively variable weather and it goes and stays consistent… for the whole damned day! I was both delighted and irritated – a uniquely Scottish state of mind. We’re funny that way; we can maintain multiple thoroughly conflicting emotions all at the same time, ready to pull one to the forefront at a moment’s notice.

What the hell am I going on about now; how’d I get to that. Oh, right, the weather. Sun, cloud, dry, little wind. OK. Moving on.

 

First stop of the day was McCaig’s Folly… sorry, McCaig’s Tower. The locals refer to it as the folly because they thought it was a bad idea. But I have to confess that I love it. This is a tower built at the turn of the 20th century, in the style of the Colosseum, that sits prominently above Oban like a crown. There’s not many centuries old coastal harbor towns in Scotland that can claim their very own Roman/Greek architecturally influenced landmarks, so it’s pretty much one of Oban’s defining features. McCaig commissioned it in order to employ a whole lot of craftsmen that lived in and around Oban, but had little or no work. Pretty decent move, on the whole. I don’t know if it was completed to the full specification, but it’s a helluva thing. And there is no better view of Oban harbour, the train station, the ferry port, the center of town, and the islands of the Southern Hebrides. John and company hadn’t made it up there on their last trip*, and I wasn’t about to let him visit Oban for a second time and not visit McCaig’s Tower.

*It’s a steep climb (though not as steep as the climb to come in an hour or two, heh heh)

Once we’d finished drinking in the view of Oban from on high, we collected the car and drove south to the Isle of Seil.

When I was but a nipper, two good friends (Martin and Magnus) and I would occasionally make the trip to the Isle of Seil. Martin’s folks owned a cottage in the old slate mining village of Ellenabeich, on the west coast of the island. It was quiet, remote, and sat at the base of a hill called Dun Mor, the top of which was a spectacular place to star gaze. Honestly, that was the reason for our first visit all those years ago. We were playing around with astrophotography (using ye olde 1600 and 3200 speed camera film), and we just couldn’t get good results in and around the Glasgow suburbs. There was too much light pollution. We’d tried once from the waterworks behind the street that I grew up on, which is right on the northernmost outskirts of town, but even there all the photos came out orange hued due to the sodium street lamps nearby. The photos did show that we were being closely observed by cattle in the neighboring field, which were completely invisible to us when we were out there. So, you know, the high speed film was doing its job (though I suspect astronomers may argue with the notion that nighttime cattle photography has any relevance to the field whatsoever; this isn’t the “field” of astronomy. Hah!).

Seriously, tangent city or what. What the hell was I talking about this time…  ah, right, got it. Light pollution. We wanted to take photographs of the night sky without the light pollution, and Martin realised he knew exactly the right place and so we headed to his folks’ holiday cottage. Ellenabeich puts off damned near zero light pollution, and the nearest “big” town was Oban, about 20 miles away behind many many hills. So we made our first visit, climbed Dun Mor in the dark (which is a tad precarious, even in the daylight), and took our photos. Which came out brilliantly.

 

I also chose to climb Dun Mor during the day… and absolutely fell in love with the view from the top of that wee coastal, slate rock hill. It’s stunning. You’re looking out over everything, with views inland, across islands to the south, along a beautifully rugged coastline to the north, out over the Atlantic to the west, all with the sound of waves breaking against the base of Dun Mor below you. Sun, rain, wind, doesn’t matter. The view is stunning. When I reach the top of Dun Mor, every time, I feel a thrill, get goosebumps on my arms, catch a breath, and just relax. I could stand there all day. I /have/ stood there for many hours. It’s not an easy climb to get there – I mean, it’s not mountaineering or anything, but it’s steep and a little treacherous in places. And this is a slate rock mountain, so things crumble every now and then. So, not an easy climb, but for me it’s essentially a pilgrimage as the top of that hill has been responsible for the closest thing to spiritual as I’m ever likely to experience in my life.

It’s hard to convey this stuff in writing. The above is my me best attempt for now to convey what daytime is like up there for me. I think that a large part of the experience, of the view, is that it affords me a sense of perspective, a sense of scale with respect to the world that I live on. The nighttime visits took that to a whole new level; a greater order of magnitude (quite literally). When the skies were clear, I would just lie on the ground and look up. This is the highest point for miles around, so there’s nothing to interrupt the view. And the white noise of the invisible ocean waves below block out any other human made sounds, sometimes even my own breathing.

I would just lie there looking up, disconnect mentally from the world I live on, and lose myself in the stars that filled my view. An infinite perspective. I could look out there in awe, marvel at the scale, and marvel at the fact that I had a place in it.

<sigh>

In the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams introduces a device called the “Total Perspective Vortex” which was designed as a form of capital punishment. (Yes, I know, it seems l like a /bizarre/ left turn, but bear with me). The condemned would sit inside the machine, which would then surround them with a representation of the entire universe, with a teeeeny tiny arrow that reads “You Are Here”. The idea was that this clear demonstration of just how utterly insignificant they were would be more than the person could handle and the shock would kill them. A very Adams idea. However, when I try to induce much the same thing in myself by, say, climbing a hill in the dark, lying on my back, and losing myself mentally in the view that the universe presented, I get something different. I think  how infinitely complex a human being is, and yet how infinitely small a human being is compared with the universe. It doesn’t scare me, and I don’t think that it makes me insignificant. It just makes me smile. It relaxes me. It moves me.

And so I climb to the top of Dun Mor whenever I can and have my wee moment.

[Deep Breath]

Right, moment had. And shared with a friend, which itself made me happy. Time to climb back down and eat. That’s about 8,000 steps already, most of them vertical, so we’re a little peckish.

Since the days I spent long weekends in Ellenabeich, a great wee seafood restaurant has opened up: the Blue Oyster Bar and Restaurant. Great seafood, good selection of beers and drams, so we’re sorted. Started with some local oysters which were fat and juicy and pretty amazing. They paired nicely with some Ledaig as well (told you we’d get some whisky in there somewhere). Then I just had local fish and chips, while John enjoyed some Cullen Skink (Scottish style fish soup) and langoustines. The langoustines were dead, but clearly still pissed off, and spent their last moments intact staring annoyedly at me from the plate. It was a little off-putting.

I wasn’t going to have dessert, but then I overheard our waitress mention Millionaire’s Shortbread iced cream. I beckoned her over to confirm, which she did, and then we danced a wee dance as she somewhat mischievously tried to convince me to have it with the sticky toffee pudding because what the hell all-in. I resisted, but only just. She did persuade me to add the toffee sauce though, so maybe we’ll call it a draw. Pudding had, we jumped in the car and headed back to Oban. Well, I mean, we paid first; we didn’t just scoff the iced cream and scarper. Pretty sure she’d have taken me down in the car park anyway.

We headed back to Oban, back over the … wait. I forgot to mentiont the Bridge Over the Atlantic! The Clachan Bridge, which connects the mainland road to the roads on Seil, is often referred to as the Bridge Across the Atlantic. The Clachan Sound, the body of water that the bridge spans, is technically connected to the Atlantic at both the north and southe ends, hence the bridge kinda sorta crosses the Atlantic in it’s own wee way. Single file traffic only, and in the summer, the south side is covered in beautiful wee purple flowers.

Back in Oban, we really just wandered.  We did pop in to the Oban distillery, mostly so that we could honestly say that we visited a distillery every day of our trip, but also to see if they had anything interesting to try at their bar (we’d both done their one tour before; I’d done it twice, actually). Sadly, the tasting bar was closed for staff training. So we just picked up a couple of things at the shop. I’ve got that collection of distillery pins, but both previous visits to the distillery were in the pre-pin days. So that’s sorted now.

We stopped in to two other whisky shops, avoided buying a full case in order to take advantage of a rather good shipping and customs payments deal that one chap was offering, and then headed to the dock. There were three ferries at the pier: the MV Clansman, parked for the night; the  MV Isle of Mull, which loaded and left; and the MV Loch Frisa, which was both a boat and a design I’d never seen before. So I oogled her for a bit. We also oogled the sheer size of the MV Clansman, which may be one of the largest in the fleet. Then we oogled the menu at The Waterfront Fishhouse Restaurant, where we promptly made bookings for dinner. Grabbed a drink first, headed back for dinner, then back to the room for an early-ish night. We need to get on the road a little earlier than usual tomorrow.

Oh, but first we drank the drams we’d had to bottle at Caol Ila two days ago. And a dram from a miniature that I’d picked up in a Scottish tweed and gift shop along the main drag.

  • Caol Ila 12 yr, 43% – their basic expression, and almost an entry-level Islay
  • Caol Ila 14 yr Four Corners Edition, 53% – released in conjunction with three other distilleries
  • Caol Ila Distillery Only Bottling, 57.4% – CA Red Wine finished
  • Finlaggan Old Reserve, 40% – a new to us, independently bottled Islay that may be Caol Ila.