"Impressions of Mull"

 

This is the story of my trip to the Isles of Mull, Iona and Ulva, Oban and Glen Strae in the early summer of 2008, motivated in part by a search for a job somewhere in that area when things had started to go wrong for me workwise in the Republic of Ireland and I decided to take the step to hopefully find a new life in Scotland. My story again is a day-to-day account of how I got on and all the stunningly beautiful places I saw along the way, again over a period of just under two weeks.

I really hope you will enjoy the journey as much as I did and do have a look at all the pictures I have uploaded from that trip before you go!

The "Impressions of Mull" Story 63 Pages in PDF Format. £8.00	Sheela-na-Gig at Nunnery on Iona
Bunessan Sunset	Fossilized Tree Stump? - Mull
"My" Bothy in Bunessan, Mull, bathed in the light of a sunset.	Another Bunessan Sunset - Mull
Ancient Granite Bridge on Mull	Black Guillemot on the Waterfront in Oban
Little Black Guillemot in Flight	Another little Black Guillemot in Whirring Flight

An excerpt from this story:

                                  < Day Two >

 

 

In the morning, after I had had my breakfast of oat flakes with some fruit I had brought over from Ireland because I never like wasting anything if I can avoid it, I unpacked a few things and was glad to find that I had sufficient hangers for everything, which is not always the case, as many of you fellow travellers might know, too. Then I drove over to the village and set about exploring it.

There were a couple of grocery shops and a large gift shop. The post office was situated in one of the grocery shops. There was a telephone booth, a modern one, standing at the water front, from which I hoped to call my family at some stage.

I bought a few things I would need during the next days, a better map of the island than I already had and a book I couldn’t resist buying. It was a follow-up of the first ladies’ detective agency in Botswana, by Alexander McCall. I had seen the film about that some time previously and had loved it. It has so much atmosphere and is so uplifting, the way that young lady manages to get her little business going. But then, it is only a story, and stories always end as they are meant to. Life on the other hand only ends as it feels like ending, for me at any rate, and it has disappointed me far too often. All I ever seem to get right is creating beautiful situations for myself; but whenever my financial situation is supposed to become beautiful and my occupation related to that is supposed to become meaningful, I always seem to draw a blank! All my enthusiasm whenever I have a new idea very soon gets a proper dowsing and I have to declare myself defeated once again, because usually other people are not interested in cooperating with me in the way I would have liked them to. They never need me, or if they believe they do, they very soon seem to feel that they made a mistake regarding me.

Oh well, I suppose while there is life there is hope, and since I have to continue being alive, I must continue finding new ideas, in case one of them actually works out!...

I brought my shopping back home and then set out for Fionnphort to investigate the situation of the ferry to Iona. Everyone I had spoken to up till then had indicated that this would be the best place for finding work, because all the foreign tourists that came on organized trips were always brought straight through Mull without stopping anywhere and on to Iona.

A fifteen-minute drive brought me to Fionnphort (pronounced Finafort). This is another quite small settlement with just a couple of shops and one pub and restaurant as far as I could see. I found this very depressing, because it meant that even here hardly anybody was able to thrive on the tourists brought here on their way to Iona, for which reason there clearly didn’t seem to be any point in opening up any kind of a business here, be it of the restoration kind or arts and crafts, apart from the few that were already there. Naturally the local residents needed a grocery store and so on, and the few tourists in the self-catering or B and B places, too, but other than that...

At the ferry terminal I was told that there was no need to book ahead, which again showed me how little there was still going on here. I mean, Iona is such a famous place with so much ancient history, and we were at the start of the high season, if you please, so what was going wrong?

While I was browsing through the excellent book section of the aforementioned grocery store, a lady informed everyone that there were dolphins in the bay. I didn’t think they would leave for a while now that they had come, so I went to my car to get the binoculars I had left there, as well as my jacket, for the sun had gone behind some clouds and it was cooler now than it had been before. Therefore, by the time I reached the water the dolphins had in fact already passed on along the coast and out of sight.

I had missed them again.

I returned to the store and picked up and paid for all the books and a DVD I had decided to buy. Then I returned to my car and decided to go up to the Heritage Centre at the end of a side street. It was a little past one o’clock by then and this centre was closed. It would open again in an hour, but since there wasn’t really anywhere to go meanwhile, I decided to forego this visit altogether and return home. I then spent a couple of hours having something to eat and watching Wimbledon on the telly. Rain had set in and it came down quite heavily. Then, at around four o’clock it stopped and since one of the books I had already bought contained a series of walks in that part of the island, I decided to try one to Ardtun point, a place that was fairly close by on the coast and where there were supposed to be some fossilized leaves to be seen imprinted in the rocks.

I put on my hiking boots and also took an umbrella along in my little backpack in case the rain started up again, and set off down the road towards the headland. I eventually ended up at a farm house, where I asked the farmer, who just at that moment happened to step out of his kitchen, whether there was a path leading on from there, but there was nothing for it but for me to climb over a gate and walk through the pasture.

Now, because of all the rain, the ground was quite wet in far too many places for my liking. The first stretch uphill towards a cairn (“the cairn with its back to Alba”, according to a very clever book by a fellow called Charles McLean about all the place names on Mull that I had just bought that morning in Fionnphort) wasn’t so bad, but when I had to go back downhill again towards the by then not very far away cliffs I got into quite serious trouble. The ground was of course peaty and wherever I thought there was a path going through it, it actually turned out to be a path for the water beneath the fairly long grass and every time I had to step back very quickly if I didn’t want to have water running into my boots.

I actually managed that very well, I would like to mention at this point, so I am not totally useless!

I did, however, have to walk in a very zigzag-like fashion and consequently made extremely slow progress. However, since I knew that the sun wouldn’t go down until about ten o’clock, I felt very calm really, only quite frustrated at constantly finding myself before yet another patch of waterlogged ground, so if you are of a more sensitive nature, perhaps you will be glad not to have been there with me, because there was an almost continuous stream of very nasty oaths exiting my mouth, in Mallorcan mainly, which I usually find the most adequate at such times. Yes, I am sorry, but I am the kind of person who exteriorizes their wrath. It is said to be healthier than keeping it in, though, isn’t it, for the person exteriorizing.

When I had finally reached the cliff’s edge, I managed to clamber down it fairly soon, but then there was another wide ledge of the same grassland there, equally waterlogged, which meant that my difficulties definitely had not ended yet. Below that, there were just absolutely nonnegotiable rocks, so my only option was to plod on as best as I could along the grassy stretch.

I did manage that, too, and finally arrived at the gully where these fossilized leaves were supposed to be. Well, the farmer had already warned me that I would probably not find anything, and I did not. The place had been completely plundered by former visitors, which I thought extremely selfish of them. I was told that there had even been geology groups among them, who I felt should really have known better than to desecrate a valuable geological site like that.

Oh well, in view of my success, I decided to walk on just a little bit further, to a place where I could sit on a rock and contemplate the lovely calm expanse of water before me. It reminded me of the gulf at the Valdes peninsula and I thought back to the occasion when I had seen several whales from the lookout point at Punta Piramides. The silvery colour of the water at that time was similar, too, but here I saw no whale or dolphin in the time I sat there, only half a dozen cormorants hanging their wing feathers out to dry on a rock to my right. To my left, I could see some basalt rocks, blackened by peat or the humidity in the air, I guessed, and lying at an angle of about 45 degrees instead of standing upright as they are usually seen and as I could also see them on the upper level of the cliff behind me, for I was still on this intermediate level covered with grass and a lot of fern, or bracken, in some places. In the distance I could see the rather ominous-looking dark oblong basalt mass of Staffa among the other islands in that area. It made me think of a large submarine that was resting on the surface. Strange.

After a fairly long while of sitting there and absorbing the peaceful atmosphere of that place I started on my way back. This time I found a path higher up than the one before and I had already seemed to have become used to the waterlogged places and very often simply stepped into them. My feet still remained dry in my boots and would actually remain so until I got home, proving my boots to be very water resistant. They were supposed to have been very good quality when I bought them the year before in an outfitters’ for outdoor activities in Dublin and I must say they have proven to be. Anyway, like this I managed to get to that gate in better time than on the outward journey.

When I arrived, I saw that there were a handful of cattle standing and lying in the vicinity, and two were actually standing right in front of the gate. Oops, I thought, will they be good or am I going to have to shriek for help here? I had never been on a cattle pasture like this before in Scotland, so I had no idea what would happen. I wasn’t wearing anything red and after breathing in deeply several times, I determined that I would just pretend I was in charge.

This strategy evidently worked. All the ones lying down stayed put and the one that was standing broadside to the gate I just tapped it on its behind and told it to move over a bit, which it did!

So, I was free to climb over the gate any way I wanted. I thought to myself then that possibly Scottish cattle simply were far more docile than the at times really quite aggressive Friesians of which I had such bad memories from a holiday at a pony-riding establishment in the north of Germany a very long time ago. On that occasion, all the other children had wanted to go on a moonlight walk. I can never see very much in the dark, but I had to come along anyway. We ended up on a cattle pasture, because it would have been a shortcut to where we needed to go. This pasture was in a hilly area and so enormous, that one couldn’t see the other end of it, as is usual in Schleswig-Holstein. All of a sudden, all these cows appeared on the horizon and bore down on us at a gallop!

We had a dog with us, so he very valiantly kept the animals at bay until we had all managed to climb through the wire again. To us it had seemed that those cows had wanted to defend their pasture and really seemed bent on attacking us. They were certainly trying to butt the dog away all the time with their heads held low. It was a very scary moment for all of us, I can tell you. During the day, however, cows in that area didn’t seem in any way aggressive either, just very inquisitive and eager to meet our ponies over the fence.

As soon as I had climbed over that gate, it suddenly started to rain again and quite heavily, so I was very glad to have brought my umbrella along. What good fortune I had had, though, that the rain did not return until I had regained a smooth surface, because it certainly wouldn’t have been much fun finding my way through that pasture with an umbrella, and perhaps the cows might have become alarmed at sight of it, too.

And it had a lot of red on it…

I spent the evening watching Wimbledon. A match between the world number two at that time, a really excellent Mallorcan lad called Rafael Nadal and a German player called Michael Berrer was still on and didn’t finish till about nine o’clock, with the Mallorcan winning.

After that it wasn’t long until I went to bed.