Beauties of Argyll

Just back from a couple of days away at Crinan Hotel. We were expecting cold rainy weather - so the forecasters said - and actually had brilliant sunny weather. It is amazing how variable weather can be in this little island of ours. Got well and truly bitten by the notorious Scottish midgie, too.
We stopped at Dunardy halfway along the Crinan Canal to give Tim a walk. We had a lovely saunter through Foresty Commisssion woods and finally broke out of the trees and were rewarded with an ever expanding view. The higher we climbed, the better the view, so we kept on climbing! It was a gentle, curving climb. I don't want to give the impression I climbed something like Mt Everest, but it certainly had us breathing more deeply than usual.

In the bar that night we sat quietly eating our meal and could not help but hear the conversation at the next table. "It's going to rain all day tomorrow, but that might flatten the sea!"

I remembered that Crinan is basically a sailing community, and then the comment made sense.  Still it didn't raise our spirits, I can tell you, and we wondered what we would do if  the prophecy came true. Next morning when we looked out of our bedroom window, the view of the loch didn't inspire. 

It had obviously been raining hard overnight, Still we decided to do the walk we'd planned, and drove the mile or so up the hill, took the right fork down the hill and into Crinan Harbour proper. For all our visits here, we'd never thought to do this bit, and it is very pretty. This is the natural harbour for Crinan, where all the sailing yachts hide away. 

We parked up and set off along the rocky sea shore. The path is sometimes under water at high tide, but the only water was from overnight rain. Then, as expected, the path turned left and uphill. It went on uphill for the next hour, with us taking brief respites after a particularly steep section. We met the forestry road and set off on a level path - well, it swooped up and down but was comparatively flat to the hillside we'd just climbed. Way markers kept us on the trail and took us through a variety of trails, grassy tracks, through woods until we finally climbed Creg Mhor to visit the remains of iron-age Castle Dounie. We sat at the top for quite a while, gazing out over Loch Crinan bathed in brilliant sunshine.