![\"220px-Kintyre-Scotland.svg\"](\"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/220px-Kintyre-Scotland.svg_.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThis time I wasn’t going to walk and I wasn’t going to camp.<\/p>\n
I borrowed a bike from two of Paul and Deborah’s friends–Fiona and Pieter–who live up the road from them in Colintraive, on the Kyles of Bute. They are an Englishwoman and a Dutchman who chucked fast-lane jobs in Switzerland to become felters in Scotland. \u00a0They use local wool to make felt for practical (blankets, rugs, vests) and decorative (lampshades, wall hangings) purposes.<\/p>\n
I booked nights in a B&B and a hotel, traveling light in an overstuffed day pack. \u00a0I brought the binoculars this time.<\/p>\n
Deborah and Paul drove me and the bike to Southend, a village at the peninsula’s meatus. \u00a0We had lunch and then drove up to the top of a headland called the Mull of Kintyre. \u00a0Paul McCartney and Wings had a hit song of that name in 1977; Sir Paul has owned a farm nearby since 1966.<\/p>\n
On a clear day you can see Ireland from the mull, but when we were there the top was in a cloud. \u00a0We walked out of the cloud and down the other side a short distance to get a glimpse of the lighthouse, built in 1788.<\/p>\n
I was going to ride down the hill back to Southend, but it seemed unwise on a foggy day (and on a one-lane road). \u00a0So my friends deposited me on the flat and headed home. \u00a0I rode back to Southend to explore.<\/p>\n The biggest building there by far is the unoccupied Keil Hotel. \u00a0It was finished in 1939, and before it could open the British government requisitioned it as a Navy hospital. \u00a0It was also painted white as a navigational aid, as many of Britain’s lighthouses were extinguished during the war. \u00a0The five-story building opened as a hotel in 1947, closed in 1990 and was stripped of pipes, wiring, etc. \u00a0An attempt is underway to renovate it but it’s right on the verge of being a lost cause.<\/p>\n Looking the other way you can see Dunaverty Rock. \u00a0It is the site of a castle built by Vikings in AD 712 and where the Scottish King Robert the Bruce sought refuge in 1306. \u00a0It was the scene of various battles, sieges and massacres.<\/p>\n The most notorious was in 1647 when an army of Covenanters blocked the water supply to the castle to force the surrender of a garrison loyal to the English king. \u00a0In one version of the story, the 300 people in the castle were promised “quarter”–protection and mercy–but were killed, including the women and children, when they surrendered and gave up their arms.\u00a0 The Covenanters were reportedly convinced to spare the life of one boy.<\/p>\n Some were thrown off the rock into the sea.<\/p>\n Very little of the castle exists. \u00a0But there’s a sign testifying to how much progress the place has made in the last 400 years.<\/p>\n I rode out on a 125-year-old golf course next to the castle to see a standing stone that was marked on the map. \u00a0I haven’t been able to find out much about this particular one, but many standing stones go back as far as 3000 BCE. \u00a0As I was looking around it occurred to me I could play golf on this trip, too. \u00a0 What an opportunity–hitting the pill around a links course that has a prehistoric monolith in the rough!<\/p>\n I stopped at the clubhouse, where the man running the shop, Jim, was vaping and shooting the breeze with a couple other guys. \u00a0There were only a couple of groups on the course. \u00a0He said the full kit–a set of clubs (“I’ve got some really good ones, if you’re left-handed”), a pull “trolley” and the greens fees–would be 36 pounds, roughly $55. It was too late to play that afternoon. \u00a0 As I rode the 12 miles back to Campbeltown where I was spending the night, I tried to figure out how to fit it in.<\/p>\n One of the things I wanted to do was tour a distillery in Campbeltown, where three brands of single-malt whisky (including the well-known one, Springbank) are made. \u00a0It is one of two distilleries where every step of the process, from malting the barley to filling the bottles, is done in one place.<\/p>\n Tours were at 10 and 2. \u00a0I decided to take the morning one, then catch the noon bus back to Southend, play golf, return to Campbeltown on the 4.15 p.m. bus, and then get on the road to the next destination, Carradale, 16 miles to the north.<\/p>\n When I went to the whisky shop in town to buy tickets for the tour I was told it was delayed until 10.30. \u00a0A bus with 41 tourists was running late. \u00a0This wasn’t what I expected for the first tour on a Monday morning.<\/p>\n Also signed up for the morning tour was a German named Roger, who had toured Talisker on the Isle of Skye the year before and was heading to Islay the next day to take in three or four more. \u00a0We waited at the distillery gate for more than half an hour. \u00a0Finally, a ruddy-faced man named Jim came out and said he’d show us around. \u00a0 The bus wasn’t going to arrive until 11. \u00a0So instead of having 43 people on the tour, we had two.<\/p>\n As you can probably imagine, making whisky is a complicated process (although the distilling team consists of only six people). \u00a0It starts with soaking barley in water and then spreading several tons of it on the floor, where it is turned six times a day as it starts to germinate, turning the starch into sugar.<\/p>\n Germination is stopped by drying it. \u00a0For two of its three types of whisky, the distillery does this with heat that also contains smoke from burning peat. \u00a0One type gets six hours of smoke exposure, the other 48. \u00a0That’s one of the reason they taste different.<\/p>\n There are many more steps leading to distillation, which is done twice. \u00a0(Actually a fraction of the run is distilled a third time and added to the final product, which is why Springbank is marketed as “distilled two and one-half times”).<\/p>\n At one point\u00a0the liquor is\u00a0clear “spirit,” more than 70 percent alcohol. \u00a0Very powerful, but not tasteless.<\/p>\n Then it goes into oak barrels that have been previously used in bourbon making, or had once held Spanish sherry for six years. \u00a0The spirit sits in the barrel, unturned and untouched, for at least 10 years. \u00a0It gets its color and some of its flavor from the essences extracted from the wood.<\/p>\n I missed the vatting and bottling steps because I had to catch the bus. \u00a0There were six people on it. \u00a0I struck up a conversation with one of them, a man named Mike Healey.<\/p>\n He had just retired from the Glasgow School of Art. \u00a0The hotel I’d stayed in in Glasgow was right next to the school, so I knew about it. \u00a0He taught graphic art and lived with his wife in Southend, where she’d been a primary school teacher. \u00a0He’d been a visiting professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art for a year in the early 1980s.<\/p>\n He’d won a scholastic prize when he’d graduated from the Glasgow School of Art that paid for a year of travel in the United States to meet artists. \u00a0He crossed the country five times on buses. \u00a0One of the artists he visited was Norman Rockwell, who invited him to stay at his house in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for a week.<\/p>\n “Rockwell was a modest man and a perfect gentleman. \u00a0He lived in a rented house.”<\/p>\n Rockwell was painting a picture of the Liberty Bell with a birthday ribbon tied around it, in preparation for the Bicentennial. \u00a0His studio was large and had all sorts of props and costumes in it.<\/p>\n “He’d bring whole groups of people in from the town to pose for his pictures. \u00a0It was like a theatrical stage really. \u00a0A photographer would take pictures and he would do a lot of the work from pictures.”<\/p>\n When Mike went to the United States he assumed he would end up living there. \u00a0He enjoyed his time, although it was a lonely year. \u00a0When he left he knew he wasn’t going to live in the United States.<\/p>\n “It’s really about six countries, isn’t it?”<\/p>\n I should have asked Mike to play golf (he said he did occasionally), but unfortunately that didn’t occur to me until I was here:<\/p>\n I also spent a fair amount of time here:<\/p>\n The views were spectacular, the greens small, the wind nearly constant. \u00a0There are no electric carts. \u00a0There were hardly any players.<\/p>\n The big island in the distance, Sanda, was once owned by Jack Bruce, the bass guitarist for Cream.<\/p>\n I only played 15 holes (although I played two balls on some) because I had to catch the bus back to Campbeltown. \u00a0I went out with eight balls and turned in the bag with one left. \u00a0So I might not have made it around 18 holes even if I’d had the time. \u00a0It was lots of fun.<\/p>\n Before I left Campbeltown I stopped by the garden for the town museum to see the statue of Linda McCartney, who died in 1998. \u00a0She, her husband and their children spent a lot of time in Kintyre and were much loved (and protected) by the locals.<\/p>\n I finally got on the road. \u00a0There were a lot of hills as I cycled the road up the east coast of the peninsula. \u00a0It was a sunny day and felt like about 4 o’clock when I reached Carradale, although it was actually after 8.<\/p>\n I didn’t get underway until after noon the next day, as I needed the hotel’s wifi and it took a lot of time to upload pictures. \u00a0It was again sunny and beautiful when I hit the road. \u00a0I went through a tiny burg with an interesting name. \u00a0Let’s hope that at least one of these signs is wrong.<\/p>\n I made an unexpected detour on the way to visit the ruins of Skipness Castle, which was built in the 1200s and still had some local workers occupying a few rooms in the late 1800s.<\/p>\n It faces a body of water called Kilbrannan Sound, with the Isle of Arran (Scotland’s, not Ireland’s) in the distance. \u00a0Between the ruin and the water were fields with sheep and horses grazing. \u00a0At one corner was a seasonal seafood restaurant with picnic tables outside. \u00a0I got lunch there and watched three border collies watching and following two orphaned lambs in fenced pen.<\/p>\n The castle was, well, just about everything one could hope for in the ruined-castle department. \u00a0You could walk all the way up to the parapet and stroll around like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.<\/p>\n There walls were feet thick with little windows.<\/p>\n This is a view out the front door.<\/p>\n It’s hard to know whether this shooting port has intentional religious meaning as well.<\/p>\n I rode back to the junction where I was going to ride northwest over the hills to the western shore of Kintyre, there being no road all the way up the east to Tarbert, where the ferry terminal is. \u00a0I had left my pack at the junction with this delightful couple, Ali and Steve Ashford.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The are musicians who had moved up from England and bought a stone church that had been built in the 1750s and had closed in the 1970s. \u00a0There are a fair number of desanctified churches in Scotland for sale; they are the fourth owners of this one. \u00a0Previous owners hadn’t gotten far in renovations because the owner of the estate wouldn’t give them access to water. \u00a0He thought he should control the church even though he didn’t own it, Ali said.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n