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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nDeborah and Paul have owned it for 25 years. For most of that time they\u2019ve split their time between her and Washington, about 1\/3 and 2\/3. Paul was the art critic for The Washington Post, Deborah an event planner whose events include the annual Kennedy Center Honors (which she still helps run).<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is Paul. Deborah didn\u2019t want her picture taken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a hundred-year-old house (added onto, of course) that sits on a hillside outside the village of Colintraive, in Argyll. It overlooks the Y-shaped meeting of two fingers of Atlantic water that reach many miles into the west coast of the country. This junction is called the \u201cKyles of Bute.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bute is an island just across the way. It\u2019s fully inhabited\u2014monks lived there when the Christian Era still had only three-digit dates\u2014and now has three cheap and beautiful golf courses, several towns, a small population of Syrian refugee immigrants, and a restored castle tower, built in 1500, that just went on sale for $581,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One gets from Colintraive to Bute on one of the shorter car-ferry trips I\u2019ve been on\u2014seven minutes. It\u2019s at the narrowest passage between the two pieces of land. Until late in the 1800s, cattle drovers would swim herds of cattle across the water at low tide on the first leg of a long walk to markets in Falkirk and Glasgow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Colintraive has a \u201cheritage center\u201d in the village, about a mile from Wildflower Hall. Wall displays summarize the last thousand years, and old farming and fishing equipment fills an adjacent room. When I was there, a couple was exclaiming delight in finding forebears in the laminated copies of census records from the early 20th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a community \u201cpoly tunnel\u201d garden and a bowling pitch, with no action in either when I was there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n However, there were things to do on this visit other than check out the local attractions. Chief among them was stuffing my stores of freeze-dried food, gorp, and topographic maps into three padded envelopes and sending them to places I\u2019d be passing through so I could restock. (Even without them I\u2019m heavily laden.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deborah and Paul drove me an hour to a Scotrail station at Arochar & Tarbet, for a 9.38 a.m. train. It was not two hours late, it was not full to standing room, and it was not raining\u2014all the case when I was here two years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Four hours later the train pulled into Morar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The one hotel is full and there was a party of 40 at dinner tonight, so I guess Morar isn\u2019t the backwater it once was. Still, there can\u2019t be more than 25 houses here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was low tide in an estuary that reached in from the Atlantic. It was time to run dogs and throw balls on the mudflats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mud, like the dry land, has lots of mountains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I walked up a hill (on steps) close to the hotel. At the top, a Catholic parish had erected (and replaced at least twice) a large cross. It commemorated \u201ca very successful mission\u201d by the Redemptorist Fathers in 1889. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n