1 Week In.

We have been in Kintyre a whole week now,though it does seem a lot longer.
 Time is screwing with me again.
 Two days of sun and the rest has been wind, rain, and either mist or low cloud cover, but I have still been out every day with the mutt regardless.The camera has stayed in the bag at home though, well till today that is.

 I guess the weather is something that we are just going to have to get used to and make the most of the nice days for landscape photos and the damp days for all the beautiful flora and fauna. Like this little gem that I discovered in the woods behind the house.
In the past I have spent a LOT of time outside walking on Dartmoor and the in Peak District and I do consider myself terrain savy, meaning that I can read the land. Spot a cliff before I fall of it,or recognise a bog by the vegetation. Up here in Scotland its all different!! What I would normally think is a sheep trail turns out to be a water rub off and leads to a bog, which means backtracking. Annoying.  Also some of the bogs are completely hidden as in the vegetation in no different to that of the surrounding area, backtracking again. The bogs seem to defy logic as well. You would expect it to be wet in a gully and its dry, but on the slope approaching the gully, yes you guessed it, a bog. The first few days out on the hills have mostly involved backtracking or up to the knee in a bog, thank you to Salomon for superb boots, but still great fun and I love it. A stout walking stick is definitely part of the essential kit.
There is no doubt that its a wet country, the whole area is abundant with burns and waterfalls of all sizes and everything and I mean everything is covered with thick moss and lichen. If you can imagine the scene from the film The War Of The Worlds where the Martians had sprayed the red goo everywhere, well its just like that but in different shades of green. Truly beautiful!!

The TM 450

A view from the track to Tarbert.

We live 4 miles from the nearest town, which is great as far as I am concerned, but it is a bit of a bugger for shopping, especially since my car blew up just before we moved up here leaving us without a car. There is a good bus service, and I have the TM which is great for all the little forestry tracks but pretty rubbish for fetching the shopping. There is a back track to Tarbert, our nearest town, and yesterday I went to try and find it armed with an OS map, the mutt, camera in rucksack, and the ever present walking stick. We was told the track was good and the only hitch was the crossing of the Bardaravine River... The track is good with fantastic views over the loch and managed to get a picture in between showers. Even though the Pentax I use is weather proof, grad filters are pretty crap covered in rain, hence the blown sky, but it gives you an idea of the scenery.

The ''bridge''.

After 30 mins of walking and about the same admiring the view I found the river and the ominous bridge. I did plan to ride the TM along the back track, (more fun than the road), to get to Tarbert on nice days for some photography, because it is a lovely town with loads of potential shots. No chance of that! The ''bridge'' is an old trailer chassis on two concrete blocks with about a ten foot drop to the river below. Not a problem for me on foot, but no way is the bike going over,and mutt, well he just took one look at it and turned around and started to head back up the track. We have been across some dodgy terrain him and I in our eleven years together and he will always have a go, but not on this occasion. If he could talk it would have been a very impolite ''go forth and multiply matey''.
 After searching up and down river for an alternate crossing and finding any that would not require climbing gear, I headed home to try again on another day without the mardy dog.
I will say though that it incredibly sturdy and just need some sort of deck putting in to make it suitable for the mutt and the bike, something that I will definitely look in to, maybe some logs in between the I beams or some planking on top.