After my Barra rescue we had to return the trailer to Connel Flying Club in Oban and decided to make a weekend of it by staying in Glencoe, my favourite mountain area. We needed to repair the trailer and one of the microlight club members Ali is a welder so he was the third port of call, after picking up the trailer at East Fortune and then delivering our new Google Mini to our data centre in Edinburgh – where I was locked out and was busy cracking the combination lock when I looked up to see Kim on the other side of the gate – the back entrance was actually open and she walked through…
Ali the welder was near Dollar overlooked by the Ochil hills. Ali not only welds but has some great metal sculptures and a grass runway next to his house. Several blue flashes and general swearing about the metal being zinc treated and the job was done and we were on our way to Oban.
We stopped off at the Green Welly Stop for a venison burger at Tyndrum and to prepare for hill walking they seem to put the toilets a mile away from the cafe. Driving along the road the emergency landing roads that I had spied on my previous flight north were cordoned with ski poles which the wing would probably hit on landing. Connel bridge crosses the Falls of Lora – which were not as impressive as I have seen them but swirled away under the superb metal Connel bridge. Oban airport runways are being resurfaced and the place looks like a building site at the moment but the microlight club is friendly and we delivered the trailer with some thank you wine.
North to glencoe and booked into the Clachaig Inn (which has the welcoming sign ‘No Hawkers or Campbells’), we were too late to walk into the Lost Valley so wandered around the bottom of the hills looking forward to walking the next day. Dinner overlooking the loch and the sunset at
Holly Tree Hotel (named after the Appin Murder and in a converted Kentallen railway station) – there is a lovely pier there and there was a white rope laid out (obviously not done his seaman course and tidied up the rope with knots) – so we rearranged it into the form of a chalk murder investigation body. Kim’s dinner was a small trout, mine arrived being carried by two people – it was the Special Seafood platter – and took over an hour and three plates for the debris of mussel and oyster shells and langoustine.
We returned to the entertainment at the Inn which was an R&B band called Deep Blue – after ordering a pint of real ale which turned out to be cider we
started to recognise the band members playing Guns and Roses – they
were from Kelso and the guitarist was Alasdair’s friend – and what a performer excellent guitar playing along with his tattooed father singing and folk from Heiton and Sprouston near our home. There was something else odd – this was a climbing pub but the folk in the pub wearing leather hats and one in a dress didn’t look like the hunky folk I used to climb hills with – it turned out to be a gay stag night – less Munro bagging and more Munro debagging. Apart from one rough homophobe guy wandering around asking people if they were gay (one curiously saying ‘I used to be gay but I am not any longer’) the evening was entertaining with good music and a set of drunk glaswegian women dancing.
Apparently on retiring for the evening I managed to stub my toe and my
wife assumed that Father Jack had moved in with us as a torrent of
abuse filled the room.
The next day we awoke to rain hitting off the window – the Lost Valley was truly lost in very low cloud and heavy rain. I asked the waitress which country she was from, used to a large influx of eastern europeans – she replied Essex, which to my knowledge isn’t actually a country. The rain was getting worse so we decided to become tourists that morning.
The Glencoe visitors centre is interesting as it uses a vernacular architecture and used a variety of techniques for recycling and renewable energy. The view is stunning from there and the bookshop reveals an ecletic collection – I ended up with a book called ‘How to Shit In The Woods’ (covering defecation in sylvan surroundings in extreme detail) and a book about telepathy experiments on the west coast of Scotland. There was also an exhibition of the Himalayas by the photographer who took the pictures of the Tennant lager can lovelies.
We decided to abandon the Lost Valley walk and head for the indoor Ice Factor at Kinlochleven – the road is picturesque along Loch Leven and Kinlochleven is a lovely spot, on the West Highland Way and the only industry is now tourism with the aluminium industry now a museum (which like the industry was closed on Sunday). The Ice centre there has a large ice wall and 8 and 15 metre climbing walls – as we watched a group of people leaving all with limps we knew this was for us and we started with the climbing wall intending on moving onto the ice wall without realising how absolutely exhausting climbing was on vertical walls. My arms stopped hurting after 12 hours where other parts of my body still ache. Kim and I scrambled up the first wall, falling off to show that we were saved by the rope being held by or instructor (who is a part time fireman
and had just been on helicopter training). I had problems with the Egyptian climbing style that prevents you supporting most of your weight on your arm muscles, and I ended up supporting most of my weight on
my arm muscles which was extremely tiring as the chap said it would be, so gave up halfway up the second wall exhausted – Kim carried on though to do another two walls before thankfully our time ran out. We skipped the ice wall due to severe exhaustion, but totally dedicated to doing a lot more wall climbing before setting off for the nearest climbing rock, and headed back to see if the weather had cleared for the Lost Valley (it hadn’t), visting Glencoe village and the Massacre Monument.
The yellow car game has turned into a violent car journey where driver
or passenger wallops the other if they spot a yellow car – it was a
slapfest when we passed a large queue of JCBs working on the Glencoe
bridge. It is getting a bit too automatic now and I almost walloped an
old lady on a bus in the lake district when a yellow car went past..
We decided to call a truce as I was reading ‘The Short History of
Tractors in Ukranian’ and was developing bruises on my arms…
Back to Tyndrum I got a badger puppet from the Big Green Welly and had
fish and chips at The Real Food Cafe (which is a marvel with Pollock
and chips as good as Anstruther, with beer from Alva and a wall of
recommendations including Radio 4 and Scotland the Best – this is a
must stop on the way North). We stopped off at friends near Perth
almost reversing into their Golf, these are the friends we previously
left during the night walking over their Beechgrove Garden in the dark
so bashing their car and buggering off because they weren’t in would be par for the course. The drive home was filled with cars heading in the opposite direction with miserable looking people returning from kelso races.
Glencoe is one of the magical places on earth.
We got back to find a maggotty dead sheep in the field – one of the soays had died last week – I must have miscounted my daily count or they were doing their prisoner of war bit holding up a dummy sheep.
