When we were last in Kintyre, we visited its celebrated Mull and indulged in some McCartney-related tourism.

That brings in a few bob every year; but it’s the Kintyre Way that’s doing most to attract visitors in remote south west Argyll and Bute.

The tourism people there also dreamed up a road trip, The Kintyre 66, or K66, launched in April 2020. It’s not hard to see why. Since the North Coast 500 transformed Scottish tourism, every corner of this majestic land wants its own cool-sounding route it can merch the life out of.

But if you are coming here with your mega camper van or party of vintage sports car enthusiasts – I wouldn’t bother. The roads are fiddly and single-lane, although travel writer Mike MacEacheran had a good stab at selling this as a touring experience:

The 66-mile loop around Scotland’s most southwesterly peninsula reveals a greatest hits of sorts of the Scottish countryside, but without the chaotic hum of the North Coast 500. There are the same butterscotch sands and seashell-strewn beaches; the same hard-to-reach islands and remote villages; the same heightened emotions from driving roller coaster single track; and the same herds of sheep migrating across the road. The clincher? No heavy traffic. The Independent

But I think it’s better to base yourself somewhere, lock the car, and Walk the Way.

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The Kintyre Way trickles down the peninsula like a winding burn from its source in Tarbert. The nice thing about peninsula walking is the Brobdingnagian sense of straddling two coastlines like a colossus. On some stretches, this can get confusing: ‘is that the west coast’? Ireland? Arran? Islay?’

We – wife Annie, oldest buddy and walking pal Spike and Machi (a dog) – had originally intended to do our neighbourhood pilgrimage: St Cuthbert’s Way, from Melrose to Lindisfarne. Logistics and hotel/pub prices put us off. Is Northumbria becoming too popular for its own good, I wonder?

So, we needed an alternative. The excellent Walkers Club website names the Kintyre Way as one of its hidden gems. The 100-mile route is well signposted – and the signs are rather pretty, too. It winds through a quintessential landscape of natural and manmade forest, beach, moorland, headland and farmland. Several stretches are along roads. Tourism and hence traffic is pretty light down here, although I’d avoid the tarmac when the tradies and council trucks are racing to their first appointments or heading home for their tea.

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As an excuse for not walking the whole Kintyre way, ‘it was too hot’ is not one you often get up here at latitude 55.59 North.

But it really was, especially if one of your party is a fully-grown Akita (above, cooling her paws) with a double coat. It’s possibly an exaggeration to say that our crossing of Carradale Bay on the first day out felt a bit like Wilfred Thesiger’s famous journey across Arabia’s Empty Quarter in the 1950s. But it was warm and we had to seek shelter and fresh water for a thirsty dog in the seagrove meadows that cluster inland from the beach.

We badly needed beer, tea or food of any description. But it’s a sign of Kintyre’s somewhat precarious existence as a tourism centre that nothing was open that summer weekday afternoon.

The owners of one pub had retired, while they ‘couldn’t get the staff’ in another. We were facing a parched three-hour trek back to our lodgings at Torrisdale Castle when we found Drumfearne, a sturdy guesthouse and tea rooms set among gardens with several allotments-worth of fresh fruit and vegetable plants. Here was a very welcome late lunch of thick cut sandwiches, salad and chips. The owners, a delightful Latvian couple who came to Scotland 30 years ago, deserve all the custom they can get, especially as the rest of Carradale, a sleepy , strung-out village with a harbour and a fine village shop, seems to have given up on the hospitality business.

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Twinned with Brobdingnag

Could easily be Scotland. Check out the raspberries

In the early 18th century, a traveller alighted on a different peninsula. The natives were intimidating, so he hid in a field. It was a good place to hide, as the grass was 10 feet tall and the corn stalks roughly 40 feet high.

The peninsula is somewhere in the Northwest Pacific, and fictional. Still, Gulliver’s land of giants, Brobdingnag, could easily be twinned with the Kintyre Peninsula in summer. Walking around the grounds of Torrisdale Estate, we felt positively Liliputian, especially next to the giant rhubarb plants, some 15 or 20 feet wide, overwhelming the stream and ditches. They also have a mighty Cupressus macrocarpa, or Monterey Cypress - is a Champion Tree, the biggest, girth wise, of its kind in Scotland.

I don’t know why the combined effects of the Gulf Stream and the plentiful rainfall on the west coast of Scotland always amazes me whenever I come back here. You could be walking in Costa Rica. With Caribbean beaches up the way, treeless Iceland moors further north and mile upon mile of Scandinavian forests, you really can visit several lands in the same trip in this country of many wonders.

But superb growing conditions bring their issues. It turns out that those giant rhubarb plants have been designated an invasive species. You can’t import them any longer. Then originate in – guess where? – the Pacific – Chile. Twinned with Brobdingnag indeed.

Songs that take you places

Leaf Piece by King Creosote

My, people choose some terrible names when they set out on a career in the music business. Badly Drawn Boy? What? And if you are a winsome Swedish duo who write sublime and slightly eerie country songs, why name yourself after a container used to give immediate care to minor injuries? But that’s what First Aid Kit did.

The worst, arguably, is King Creosote. I guess Scottish singer-songwriter Kenny Anderson thought his name was fine for a local electrician, but he needed something a bit more imaginative for the stage. So he named himself after some pongy stuff you paint fences with.

It’s all the more baffling because he has one of those slightly fragile, melodious voices that seems to drift on the winds and times of his homeland, in and out of fields and shipyards and moors. That’s no more so than on his masterpiece, the soundtrack to the lyrical BBC film, From Scotland with Love.

He can write, can this monarch of an oily liquid designed to preserve wood:

I hear the songs my father sang

I have but half the voice he had

I keep it harnessed reign it in

Until the sun it melts on the horizon

That’s when I clap eyes on my lass

And I find I’m singing like a lark

My voice is calloused and my back is choked

And out of earthen clods my heart will soar

For now my tongue is held

And my wheesht is haud.

The full MARKLANDS playlist is here. Also on it from Scotland are Karina Polwart, Big Country, The Gaelic Psalm Singers, The Glasgow Phoenix Choir and Inge Thomson.

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Let’s end with an alternative song to take you to a place

Andy Stewart’s Campbelltown Loch is a not un-Scottish song stemming from irritation at the retail price of a popular liquor. Campbelltown, 'the main settlement in the south of Kintyre, had 30 distilleries at its peak: but visitors from Glasgow to the Whisky Capital of the World were famously unhappy at the price of a dram.

The lyric also has a long story attached to it, one that sounds unlikely, goes on a long time, but somehow holds you transfixed until it’s over. Take it away, Andy:

https://www.scottish-country-dancing-dictionary.com/video/z-campbeltown-loch.html

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Even the light in Buenos Aires feels European.

In her short book about Sydney, Jan Morris writes about its flat, blinding New World light. I’m quoting from memory here, but in the luminosity of Sydney she didn’t see the dust of ages. Think of the shafts of light filled with dancing particles in an arcade in Florence or through the plane trees of a quiet …

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The long and winding road to Skeroblin Loch is below the two moptop hills in the distance (let’s call them John and Paul)

You take a single track, no-through-road a few miles west of Campbelltown. You’ll probably see some farm traffic, but won’t, or shouldn’t, see any holidaymakers. There are many more scenic places on the Kintyre Peninsula, although you…

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This is the second part of a short series on Albania based on my trip there last month. The first one looked at Albania’s past and where you can experience it. This one was intended to be about the present and future of tourism in the country.

It still is. But in between posting the last one and starting this, a revolution broke out in Albania.

You may ha…

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Santiago is a big city (600 sq km, six million inhabitants) for a short stay (one afternoon and evening).

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But this t…

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But I do have one dystopian view of the place to share with you.

And al…

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This is the last in my ‘homecoming’ trilogy inspired, if that’s the word, by my mother’s death before Christmas. She was the last member of my immediate family. It’s a time to reflect on the place where I grew up.

Sixty years ago this summer, my parents moved to a new house in the village of Burbage in Leicestershire, England.

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Central Sofia, not obviously suffering from overtourism

Bulgaria found its way into a few news reports in that fuggy period between Christmas and New Year. No-one is taking much notice of very much then, so I expect only dedicated followers of European current affairs clocked the story.

On January 1, Bulgaria adopted the Euro, although the Lev will still…

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Anytown, UK. This one happens to be mine

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Let’s approach the town from the north.

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We are in the flatlands created by ancient ice sheets and divided into regular fields and hedges by the enclosure movemen…

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Photo by Julia Solonina on Unsplash

You can tell a lot about a destination from the slogans on the souvenir shop t-shirts.

Here’s one I found in Reyjavik. It was a well-cut garment in good cotton, black, with a map of Iceland surrounded by hand-drawn waves. The slogan:

Iceland. Not just cold. But also expensive.

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Cover photo from Beachworks by The Modern Time Machine

It’s been hot in Britain for most of the summer, ‘even’, say the weather forecasters, ‘in Scotland’. I live in the Scottish Borders and this is the kind of lazy meteorological bias we have to endure. Take a recent Economist article about our cute local power station, Torness, which referred to the ‘d…

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Been to see the river man. Robert Macfarlane © Mark Wormald

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I took my time over it. Usually, with an author you like or one who tells a story well, you take the pages at a kind of jog-trot. But Macfarlane’s books are all about walking, pausing, reflecting, peering, going back over your …

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