From Cara House we made our way to the spine of the island and gained a grand view of Gigha and the Paps of Jura to the north and the north west.
Continuing southwards, we approached the Mull of Cara at the southernmost extremity of the island.
On the way we passed this beautiful tombolo beach and found ourselves in a sea of bluebells which...
....stretched all the way to the Mull of Cara.
On the way we met the resident goat population. When I visited the Punjab, I developed a taste for goat bhuna (though I tended to leave the trotters at the side of the plate as my dental work was too expensive to risk on the enthusiastic crunching I was hearing from my Punjabi friend's mouths). There used to be too many goats on Cara and as a result there were hardly any wild flowers. There were also lots of goat carcasses littered round the island in spring as the island was not big enough to support the population over the winter. On a previous visit the captain of the Gigha ferry told me that a Yorkshire gentleman, with a chain of Indian restaurants, brought a refrigerated lorry and some Punjabi friends with long guns north to Kintyre. There are now...
...a sensible number of goats and the wild flowers have returned. Salt licks for the goats have been placed round the island so the goats are now being properly managed.The proportion of albino goats has increased since the shooting started, perhaps the recipe for goat bhuna calls for a brown goat.
Anyway on Cara the albino gene frequency is higher in goats than bluebells, I only spotted two albino clusters in this huge...
...field of bluebells, which led all the way to the Mull of Cara and...
...the Brownie's chair from which we enjoyed a view to the distant Mull of Kintyre.
