Kintyre Continued

The Kintyre Peninsula is almost an island, and is well worthy of further exploration. It attracts many walkers and nature lovers, and the Kintyre Way is a recently-designated long distance walk, which, by co-incidence, a friend of our was doing, using the Jura Apartment at Muasdale Touring Park as their base. Now this is an 89 mile waymarked walk, which sounds “easy” however, experienced as he was, by day three he had to pull out due to a blister severe enough to need medical treatment, and instructions not to do anymore walking that week, so it’s not an activity to be undertaken by the inexperienced. Apparantly, what finally did him in was walking over a boggy peat surface, which acted as a suction on the walking boots, leading to the horrendous blister.

The main town on Kintyre is Campbeltown, approx 17 miles from Muasdale, where there is an excellent range of independent shops as well as takeaways, the ubiquitous Co-Op and a surprisingly largeTesco Metro. We decided we HAD to visit the Mull of Kintyre, but to be honest, were a little disappointed. “Oh Mist Rolling in from the Sea” sums up the day we visited, and we could very little. The drive down to the Mull is 7 miles on a single track road, which is a spectacular drive (there are plenty of passing places clearly marked with black and wide striped poles) but it would have been crazy to take the motorhome down. There’s a small car park at the end – for approx 10 cars, and from there you continue on foot to the lighthouse, down an EXTREMELY steep hill. We ventured about half way then decided we could see what we needed from there, thank you very much.

The small east coast fishing village of Carradale is worth a visit, but our favourite place was Southend, in the south, where seals were close to the shore and totally unfazed by humans. There are prehistoric caves to explore too, where stoneage man (and woman) would have lived pretty cold, wet and miserable lives.

A must-do trip on the Kintyre peninsula is the circular drive round the coast road, stopping off at places of interest on the way, and this is do-able either in a day or, as we did, in bite-sized chunks.
What we noticed most about Kintyre was the sheer peace, quiet and lack of other people - wonderful! We had most places to ourselves, and it was rare to meet anyone else.

No trip to the Kintyre Peninsula is complete without a visit to Gigha, so the day before we left, we took a day trip as foot passengers across to this small island, which is owned by it's residents ..........