A busy dawn in the Sound of Islay

We had camped on the SE coast of Islay and high hills to the NW meant we had not enjoyed a sunset. However, we enjoyed a wonderful dawn over...

 ...the sound of Islay with Jura in the distance. Indeed it had turned out to be a very comfortable camp.

I took an early morning walk in the warm dawn light. There was only a slight north wind rippling the Sound of Islay but it was forecast to get up to F4/F5 by mid morning.

I  came across the sad remains of the farmstead of Gleann Choireadail (glen of the corrie of the valley i.e. a boggy hollow).

The inhabitants had probably been cleared  here from more fertile ground inland. Maybe they survived a couple of generations before giving up the struggle for survival and emigrating to more fertile ground in the New World?

We had pitched our tents on what had once been their most fertile ground but all around the ground that was once their livelihood was now just bracken and bog.

While the tents dried in the early morning sunshine we walked back to...

 ...where we had landed the boats and...

 ...soon had breakfast going while we watched...

 ..a succession of ships making their way down the Sound. First was the MV Hebridean Isles, the CalMac ferry enroute between Port Askaig on Islay and Kennacraig on Kintyre. The ferry was followed by...

 ...HMS Blyth M111, a Royal Navy mine warfare vessel which is based in the Clyde. She was also returning from the Joint Warrior exercise.

Next down the Sound was the STS Stavros S Niarchos, which we had seen heading to Colonsay the previous day.

 As she motored down the Sound we made our final preparations to launch but...

...we paused to admire her fine lines under the Paps of Jura.

Like a bat out of hell on the Clyde.

 We left Glencallum Bay on Bute with a view of four lighthouses. The nearest was Rubh' an Eun but we could also see three lighthouses on Little Cumbrae on the other side of the channel. The one on the summit is the oldest. Lower down, the one which is immediately to the right of the sail, is the eighteenth century Stevenson light and the one further to the right is the current 20th century light.

 Rubh' an Eun is effectively the Garroch Head lighthouse which guards the entrance to...

... the inner Firth of Clyde which stretched away northwards to the Arrochar Alps on the horizon.

On the crossing we kept clear of the prawn trawler Eilidh Ann GK2 was chugging down the channel while towing her trawl.

 Soon Garroch Head on Bute lay far behind us as we approached...

 ...the west coast of the Great Cumbrae. We were pleased to get across the main channel  before this...

 ...submarine and her three escort vessels came down the Clyde from the nuclear submarine base at Faslane. I think she is a Trafalgar class attack submarine.

Their escort duties over, the two RHIB's raced back to Faslane with Meatloaf's "Bat Out of Hell" blaring from their Tannoy system.

After all the excitement, it was a relief to land on Fintray Bay on the Great Cumbrae for a leisurely second luncheon.

Reviresco in Loch Fyne

Today Kilfinan is a remote and wild landscape but...

www.canmore.org.uk (You will need to create an account to see the mapping)

...place an archaeological map over today's map and you will discover this area was once a near metropolis. There was an ancient dun or hill fort on...

 ...the hill to the north of the beach so we decided to climb up to it...

 ...passing clumps of spotted orchids on the way.

Today the remains of the dun are largely two semi circular walls about 30m across and not much above ground level, which date from the Iron Age. They were built by Celtic people in pre-Roman times. However, the site was inhabited until late mediaeval times with a succession of wooden buildings. It became known as Caisteal Mhic Eoghainn (Mac Ewan Castle) and was the base for the Ewan of Otter clan. There were multiple, unrelated MacEwan clans in Scotland and the Ewans of Otter and their land became subsumed into the Campbell clan after their last chief, Swene Mac Ewen, died in 1493.

There is a stone memorial with...

...a brass plaque on which the clan motto "Reviresco" is displayed. This means grow green (or young) again.

Well the former Mac Ewan lands have grown green again even though that branch of the clan died out. The castle certainly had a commanding position. This is the view down Loch Fyne and this is the view...

...view up Loch Fyne. The building by the shore is a 19th century salt house. Salt was needed to preserve the prodigious numbers of herring which were once found in the loch. Other herring were preserved by smoking...the Loch Fyne kipper. One branch of my family came from here and my great great grandfather MacCallum was a herring fisherman. His sons followed him but the fish ran out and they had to fish further and further afield. My great, great uncle was washed overboard and lost at sea in the Southern Ocean.

Loch Fyne herring drifters by William Lionel Wyllie (1851-1931)

The traditional Loch Fyne herring fishermen used sail and oar powered boats and drift nets but the introduction in the mid 19th century of steam trawlers (based in Tarbert and Campbeltown) increased the overfishing and there was bitter rivalry between the two types of fishermen. Violence ensued and the Royal Navy had to station HMS Porcupine (a 3 gun wooden steamer built in 1844) on the loch to keep the peace. My great grandfather gave up the sea and moved to Glasgow where he got a job with the Caledonian Railway company.

The last train to Ardlamont on Argyll's Secret Coast.

 We woke on the shores of Ardlamont to discover that the wind had dropped overnight and the midges were all round the tents. They were not too bad on the beach so that is where we set up our breakfast things.

 We were not the only ones to be up early. The crane barge Forth Constructor was making her way down the Sound of Bute.

 We were on the water by 08:30 and paddled from Ardlamont Bay round to Kilbride Bay. Three eagles were soaring high overhead but that was not the only thing that caught our attention.

We came across this standard gauge railway track that curved gracefully into the waters of Kilbride Bay.

 We decided to land and investigate.

I had first heard about this railway to nowhere in Kilbride Bay back in the 1970's but had only found it a few years ago. I had heard about it from an old man in the bar at the Colintraive Hotel while I was on a yacht trip. The skipper of the yacht I had been crewing in had been in the Army and ended up as a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp. The old man had been a in the Royal Navy and had been involved with WW2 naval training exercises in the Cowal area prior to the D day landings. So it wasn't long before the pair of them were swapping yarns.

He told us the the railway was for launching  and recovering midget submarines on a wheeled trolley. Elsewhere on the internet you will find some who believe it was used to deploy an anti-submarine boom across Loch Fyne. However, this would not be a sensible place to run a boom across as the mouth of Loch Fyne is 4km to the west and then the loch is a further 3km wide at that point. The submarine boom was actually deployed 22km further up Loch Fyne, where the spit at Otter Ferry narrows the loch to 1km. The shore structure identified with the Otter Ferry boom is listed on the Canmore website site 205007.

Nowadays, this area is marketed to tourists as Argyll's Secret Coast. In the dark days of WW2 it really was a secret coast. Ardlamont Estate (and much of the Cowal peninsula) was requisitioned for Combined Operations training in Naval and amphibious landing warfare. About a quarter of a million troops were trained here and Lord Louis Mountbatten, the head of Combined Ops even stayed in the nearby Kilfinan Hotel.

Whatever, if you find yourself on the last train to Ardlamont, I suggest you get off at the stop before Kilbride Bay. It is a pretty wet journey after that.

Big boats and little boats in Brodick Bay.

As we paddled into Brodick Bay in the sunset, we were not alone. A Royal Navy type 23 frigate was exercising in the Firth. She is possibly HMS Somerset who has been involved in tracking a Russian submarine in the approaches to the Firth of Clyde.

 Next we came across two tankers. Askholmen and...

 ...Bro Deliverer. Both were waiting to go up to the terminal at Finnart on Loch Long.

 We slipped unnoticed along the hull of Bro Deliverer from stern past...

 ...midships...

...to her bow. From her anchorage it was only a short distance to the...
 

 Brodick ferry terminal. We did not have long to wait until our ferry home, MV Caledonian Isles, arrived at her berth.

It had been a fantastic winter day during which we had covered 30km and introduced another paddler, Maurice, to paddle sailing. It could not get much better, or colder...or could it?

Thousands of years in defence of the realm in the Sound of Bute.

When we rounded Garroch Head at the south end of Bute we caught first sight of our destination for our night's camp. Low lying Inchmarnock was still 10km away but already we could make out the light quartzite beach at its south end.

 On the way up the west coast of Bute we passed the Iron Age hill forts at Dunagoil and...

 ...Dunstrone and...

 ...Ardscalpsie. This was clearly a land that was worth defending.

 As we paddled up the Sound of Bute towards Inchmarnock the sun was lowering.....

...when a Type 23 frigate roared down the Sound at her full 28 knots towards the measured mile.Although too far away to identify her number, she is almost certainly HMS St Albans. She was built on the Clyde in 2000 and has just undergone a major refit and is now completing sea trials before re-entering service in the summer of 2014.