Sunset over the Enchanted Mountain.

From Craignish Point we looked southwest down the Sound of Jura and we watched the deepening twilight gather behind the rugged Isle of Jura. Long after the sun had set, the dreamy, dusky light on the distant Paps of Jura was worth the wait and the cold! It emphasised the mystical nature of these mountains; Beinn Shiantaidh (on the left) is Gaelic for Mountain of the Enchantment.

12/02/2008

Winter twighlight on Loch Beag

Loch Beag is an inlet off the Sound of Jura. At its head, surrounded by woodland, is Craignish Castle. The Castle dates from the 16th century and the original square keep has walls 7.5 feet thick. A dungeon has been cut into the rock below its foundations. Nowadays it has been converted into private apartments and it is not possible to visit it.

Loch Beag is still a secondary tidal port, perhaps reflecting its previous importance as the Craignish ferry terminal.

12/02/2008

The ferryman of Craignish

In this house lived the ferryman of Craignish.

According to the 1881 British Census, his name was Dugald Mc Farlan. He was aged 60 and lived in the house with his wife Anne aged 36 and their children Dugald 12, scholar, John 8, scholar, Margaret 6, scholar and Malcolm 4. Dugald's sister Anne 52, Handicap: Lunatic and John Mc Vicar 19, assistant ferryman also lived in this little house.

The house was not shown on the Ordnance Survey map of 1875 so it must have been built between then and 1881. Despite the overcrowding by modern standards, they probably had one of the best houses on the peninsula.

12/02/2008

The sun goes down on the last ferry to Jura.

As the sun set on our Dorus Mor adventure, we returned to our launch spot, the old Craignish Pier.


There had been a ferry running between Craignish and Kenuachdrach (now Kinuachdrachd) on Jura since the 17th century. According to the statistical account of Scotland of 1843, 3,000 sheep and 1,000 black cattle were shipped through here each year.

The present pier is not shown on the 1875 Ordnance Survey map butthe 1881 British Census records the ferryman's cottage as being occupied. The 1900 Ordnance Survey map does show the pier as a T shaped structure. Presumably the top of the T was made from wood, as no trace of it remains today.


You still can walk to the end of the pier to watch the sun go down over the Sound of Jura and the Gulf of Corryvreckan but you will wait a long time for a ferry. The last ferry left in the 1930's.

Nowadays Jura has no direct ferry link with the mainland. You need to take a ferry to Islay, get off then take a smaller ferry from Islay to Jura. Jura is a remote and wonderful place, you would be quicker going by sea kayak!

12/02/2008

Added 08/03/2008

PeterD said...
that pier looks very tall - how did you land here? Is there a beach nearby you could land at?

Peter there is a small beach about 500m further back on the single track road that ends at the jetty. Unfortunately there is no car park there. In dry weather it might be possible to park on the verge but it was too boggy when we were there. We carried the kayaks down the steep slippery rocks to the right of the pier.

Barnacle geese on an early passage north through the Sound of Jura

We finally broke out of the current that was flowing from the Dorus Mor relentlessly towards the gaping jaws of the Gulf of Corryvreckan beyond.


We were now heading north west with the rocky isle of Reisa Mhic Phaidean on our left. All day long, we had watched great skeins of barnacle geese flying north up the Sound of Jura from their wintering grounds on Islay.

They spend the summer on Spitzbergen, some 2700km away to the NNW. I do hope they were not fooled into an early departure by that glorious high pressure spell in February. They normally leave in April and the severe weather since mid February must have made a northward migration almost impossible.

Beyond the geese, you can see Kilmory Lodge on Scarba and the distant mountains of Mull.

12/03/2008

Eddy lines, boils and whirlpools in the Dorus Mor

16:08:18


16:08:20 Something seems to be stirring ahead...


16:08:22 ...thankfully it's only a tiddler!


These photos were taken within the Dorus Mor before we cleared Craignish Point. We were travelling at 12km/hour which equates at 6 knots neaps as marked on the chart. I found myself progressing along an eddy line between a large, upwelling smooth boil on my right and a more disturbed area on the left. As you can see from the small blue segment on the GPS track, this corresponded with a sudden (involuntary) change in direction.

All of a sudden a small whirlpool appeared at the interface and within 2 seconds sucked air down to at least 6 feet below the surface of the crystal clear water. I dropped the camera and snatched my paddle out of the water to perform a reassuring air brace (as one does). Over the next minute I saw another five, near identical, whirlpools along the eddyline. Many years ago from a yacht, I saw about ten similar little whirlpools along another eddy line which forms nearer the Craignish peninsula.

If there had been any wind I would not have seen them, the Dorus would have been a very lively place and I would not have been doing any air bracing!

Our maximum speed was well thorough the Dorus Mor when we reached 16 to 19 km/hr where our track went northwards near where the chart mentions tide rips. We did need to paddle quite hard to break out of the race, otherwise we might have ended up heading for the Corryvreckan. We started paddling north just after we met the whirlpools. You can get some idea of the flow by the large arc of our track.

12/02/2008

Sea river

From Macaskin we paddled SW towards the islands that stream south from Garbh Reisa, the gatekeeper of the Dorus Mor.


Dorus Mor means great door or gate in Gaelic.


We were soon approaching the steep cliffs of Garbh Reisa.


We kept paddling SW until we cleared low Craignish Point. We turned to the NW when we could see straight through the Dorus Mor, past Reisa an t-Sruith, and on through the distant Gulf of Corryvreckan bounded by Jura on the left and Scarba on the right. We were now on the equivalent of a great river in the sea. If we were not able to break out of its tidal stream, we would be carried on through the Gulf of Corryvreckan and into its Great Race beyond....

12/02/2008

Snow falls on Seakayakphoto Towers

The Scottish mainland lies between 54 degrees and 58 degrees north and Shetland extends to 60 degrees north. By rights we should be frozen solid in winter but we have a temperate maritime climate thanks to the Gulf stream. This means that it is usually windy, wet and mild year round, with little differentiation between the seasons. This also means we can sea kayak year round, on the fair days.

Several regular readers of this blog, who reside furth of Scotland, may think we Scots live in a sea kayaking paradise and yes I think we do. However, it is not all light winds and sunshine. This was Glasgow this morning. Despite appearances I have only managed two days paddling in January and a further two in February.

But what a fantastic set of four days they were!!

:o)

The leaving of Macaskin

We continued round the north end of Island Macaskin and passed through the narrow channel between it and Eilean nan Gabhar. We emerged into the sunlight which was streaming up Loch Craignish. The Dorus Mor was our destination. It lay on the horizon between the rugged outline of Garbh Reisa and the low Point of Craignish. Through it, the flood tide was now streaming towards the distant hills of Jura and the great Gulf of Corryvreckan to their north.

12/02/2008

The Kilns of Macaskin

We returned to our kayaks from the abandoned settlement on Isle Macaskin. We had left them on the little landing channel that had been laboriously cleared of boulders by the former inhabitants.


We paddled up the SE coast of Macaskin and passed these ancient kilns. I have seen similar kilns on the Isle of Lismore (some 48km to the NNE), which date from the 1800s. The Lismore kilns were lime kilns and as Macaskin is relatively fertile, compared with other islands on acidic rocks, it is possible these are also lime kilns. They could however, be corn kilns.

12/02/2008

White tailed sea eagles of the Dorus Mor.

While we were exploring the islands of the Dorus Mor we saw these two magnificent white tailed sea eagles. The strong currents and disturbed waters of the race bring fish to the surface and the sea eagles are ready to swoop down and catch them with their talons.

In the summer you can also find gannets feeding here but they can dive more deeply and catch the fish with their bills.

12/02/2008

The stout trees and roots of Isle Macaskin.

We paddled up the rugged east shore of ~Loch Craignish then crossed to Island Macaskin.


From its shore we walked over the bracken (which has covered once fertile ground) to the abandoned settlement. Inside one of the cottages, two barn owls were roosting. The settlement had 6 people living in it on the 1881 census but it was abandoned by the 1891 census. One of the last people to be born on the island was Ann Gillies in about 1860. She married Neil MacEwan and lived nearby at Kilmartin on the mainland.


This is the view from one of the cottages. The people who lived here enjoyed this fine view and took the trouble to plant these stout trees. These islands are the roots of the Scottish nation.

12/02/2008

From Nick in Chichester:
That landscape shot looks almost photoshop'd...like a fantasy landscape! lovely.

From Savage Family:
Your pictures are always of very high quality, but I am particularly struck by the two today that are taken apparently into the sun, but in which detail is preserved, rather than shaded. I was wondering what sort of settings and exposures you have used to obtain such pictures? I don't mind, of course, if you prefer not to reveal your methods, but I think you have achieved good results there.

Hello Nick and Savage Family, I am glad you liked those photos, thank you!

Most cameras give a silhouette when taking into the light shots or in other high contrast photos. This is so common that it looks "normal" and high dynamic range photos such as the two you refer to look unnatural, (yet they are much more akin to what your eyes see at the time).

The web is full of how to take HDR photos, which are normally composites of several photos, taken with different exposures and blended in Photoshop. I often use that technique but it is not possible to do it easily where the light bits are so intertwined with the dark bits as in the tree shot.The tree shot was taken with a wide angle lens, 21mm, to make the sun a relatively small source of light. I used an expensive lens (Canon L series lens) to minimise flare and maximise contrast.Expensive lenses also tend to distort the horizon less when it does not run through the centre of the photo.

It is easier to reclaim detail from underexposed parts of a photo than from highlights, which once burned out are lost for ever. So in this case, I exposed for the sky rather than the foreground. The exposure was 1/800th at f20 at 400ASA .I used the camera RAW setting to save the digital photo. This results a much larger file than the usual jpeg but it stores a lot more detail, particularly in the shadow areas. On the computer, I used the Camera Raw software to open the file and used its exposure and fill light controls to bring out the shadow detail on the trees and bracken. It was pretty easy!

From Loch Crinan to Loch Craignish

From the Crinan Canal we left the pub behind and paddled north across Loch Crinan to the sandy beach below Duntrune Castle.


This was a wonderful place to stop for a leisurely lunch.


From the mouth of Loch Craignish, looking out through the Dorus Mor to the Gulf of Corryvreckan.

After lunch we wanted to make sure the tide had built up to maximum flow in the Dorus Mor, so we took a little detour into Loch Craignish to give it some more time.

12/02/2008

Seakayakcobber to paddle from home to Moldova!

There are so many sea kayaking expeditions going on it is difficult sometimes to keep track of who is doing what and where.

But here is one that jumps right off the screen at you! Jörgen, from seakayakcobber, is going to paddle from the lake, where he lives in the Netherlands, by river and sea all the way through the heart of Europe to Moldova (some 4,200km distant) passing through 11 counties on the way.

He is not just doing it because it's there, to be first or to be fastest etc.. He is doing it to help raise money so that children in Moldova who are born with congenital or genetic facial malformations can get surgery.

It's an absolutely brilliant expedition. He will need our help with sponsorship.

Crinan, the gateway from the Clyde to the west coast.

Continuing our recent paddle in the waters of the Dorus Mor, we approached sheltered Loch Crinan. In the summer this bay will be full of moored yachts. Most of them will of course remain on the mooring for the summer with perhaps a weekend trip motoring up nearby Loch Craignish to Ardfern.


The village of Crinan stands on the rim of a steep promontory in the loch. It is sheltered by the wooded isle of Eilean da Mheinn. In the 1580/90s, Timothy Pont mapped this part of Scotland. He annotated the map thus "heir is a herbory for a ship at ylen Damein & also wthin the throat of the river".


The sea lock of the Crinan Canal.

Since his time, the Crinan Canal was built between 1794 and 1816 by John Rennie and Thomas Telford. It is 9 miles long, has 15 locks and rises to a height of 65 feet. It connects Ardrishaig on the Clyde with Crinan on the Sound of Jura. This saves the long and dangerous 128 mile long voyage round the Mull of Kintyre.

There is a fine hotel here with a very good public bar but for once we decided to make best use of the unseasonal sunshine and paddled on! We must return on a rainy day!

12/02/2008

The long and winding road, to the Mull of Galloway

I might have mixed up my McCartney songs but you get the idea...

Despite being part of mainland Scotland, when you are travelling through the Rhinns of Galloway, you feel you are on an island and so must have fallen asleep on the ferry.


The lambing season starts early here, hinted at by palm trees being just about the most common garden plant in these parts. In the southern half of the Rhinns of Galloway, you are never more than 2.5km from the Gulf Stream warmed sea and so frosts are rare.


However, it is not always like this in winter. High on the Mull, Kennedy's Cairn commemorates a postman who died on this road while delivering the mail in a snowstorm .


We left one car at East Tarbert to pick up later when we landed there. There is a road down to the old lighthouse boathouse and jetty.


You can get right down to the grass beside the boat house. The jetty was built to service the lighthouse before the road was built. If you look carefully at the top of the beach you can see a huge steel deck hatch that has been washed off a ship rounding the Mull in a storm.

17/02/2008