I had a mini-break. I mixed business with pleasure. I had a meeting on the Friday afternoon, so I booked to stay overnight, and added Saturday night as a bonus. I took my wife and the little black spaniel. I ended up picking the local village inn. The picture on the website looked attractive – an old coaching inn on the main street. The place was called Lochgilphead. I’d never been there before. I could hardly pronounce it. I didn’t know there was a Loch Gilp. There is. It’s a tiny puddle that feeds into the mighty Loch Fyne. I looked on the map of my pocket diary. It didn’t look that far. There seemed to be an awful lot of blue around it.
We set off at eight ‘o’ clock on Friday morning. It was raining. The dreary drive along the M8 seemed even more tedious. The rain intensified until it was sweeping under the frantic wipers. My hands tightened involuntarily round the steering wheel as we crossed the Erskine Bridge. The ground seemed to be such an awfully long way down. The A82 turned out to be a long and winding ribbon of road that took us from urban sprawl to complete wilderness in a matter of minutes. The rain turned into a jet delivered by a celestial high-speed pressure washer and the car made a bow wave along the roads. I was terrified that the engine would die, and could not remember whether the advice was to drive faster to get through the pools quickly or to crawl along ensuring that no water sprayed up onto the electrics, which, on a Citroen, are equivalent, if I could use a musical instrument allegory, to a comb and paper. I took a middle stance and ploughed along at 15 m.p.h.
The rain eased, but then we came upon a stretch of road called ‘Rest and Be Thankful’, It should have been renamed ‘Survive and Be Thankful.’ Towering rocks on one side, and waterfalls gushing down them every few yards, the latter causing the former all too regularly to fall off and crush the bonnets of cars that are hapless enough to be travelling along underneath. Halfway along this two-mile stretch, the council had decided to place traffic lights which took around ten minutes to change. I sat, fuming, whilst stones slid down the sides of the vertiginous rocks and landed in the verge, almost brushing my tyres. The road meandered past a huge loch which was more like an inland sea. The distance was 151 miles from start to finish but the four-hour journey seemed a lot longer.
We found the inn straight away. It looked a good deal less alluring than the web picture. When I saw that the best-quality newspaper of the five on the bar for the use of patrons was ‘The Daily Star’ I knew what sort of place to expect. I had stayed in such places rather too often before. The room had originally been painted magnolia but that had degenerated into an altogether more bilious colour. The toilet seat was broken, the shaving light didn’t work, there was a deep brown stain around the bath, and the mattress would have been rejected by the inmates of Alcatraz. Still, the inn was cheap, and you cannot expect the Savoy in a place where council offices are in an old castle.
My meeting was pleasant, if relatively unsuccessful. It consisted of a lady lawyer saying ‘No, you can’t possibly do that,’ every five minutes or so, and a chap resembling the bald-skulled Lesmahagow from ‘The Expedition of Humphry Clinker’, occasionally interjecting with ‘We thought about that fifteen years ago but rejected it as unworkable.’ They were both very amenable, as are all of the citizens of this part of the world.
I explored Lochgilphead. There isn’t much to explore. Two shopping streets, a few banks, a library that doesn’t open very often, a couple of churches and a police-office. The greatest shopping experience is to be had in Tesco Express. I ventured out into the town on Friday night. Lochgilphead is different at night, with its sodium street lamps reflecting on the lapping waves of Loch Fyne and, clearly visible across the water, you can see the twinkling lights of Ardrishaig. Soft rain swirled around and soaked me in minutes. The town was deserted. The atmosphere was as eerie as an Daphne Du Maurier novel and I quickened my footsteps back to the inn.
Saturday dawned mild and cloudy. After breakfast, we drove to Ardrishaig, a matter of two miles away. There is a short pier and a miniature lighthouse and a long main street of faded and slightly down-at-heel shops and houses. Above the town is the Crinan Canal, a very fine piece of civil engineering, built in 1802 and superbly kept up by the Waterways Board. I walked back along the towpath with the dog, whilst my wife drove the car back to Lochgilphead. There were grand views over the tops of the houses to the loch below.
In the afternoon, we drove to Tarbert, some ten miles further down the side of the loch. The clouds had thickened, and the light was dismal. We parked near the harbour, and wandered around the town. It was also empty, like one of those episodes of ‘The Avengers’ where Emma Peel and Steed happen on a village that has been completely abandoned because some madman has kidnapped all the inhabitants and has them herded in an underground mine. The waves on the loch were being whipped up by a sudden and indiscreet wind, and the boats made a clanking, moaning sound rather like Jacob Marley’s chains. The dog’s tail dropped between her legs, so dismayed was she by the ethereal atmosphere. The town rests in a gorge with dark mountains all around and endless water at its front. On a rocky spur stands the remains of a 15th century castle, most of which was dismantled and the stones used to build the harbour. I climbed steep stairs and treacherous grassy tracks to reach it. Black sheep with useful-looking horns regarded me balefully. I felt giddy looking down on a drop of a couple of hundred feet. I took some quick photographs and, like any good joiner, made a bolt for the door.
I wondered as I descended how on earth craftsmen built the castle in the first place, with no cranes, roads, scaffolding, any of the paraphernalia that surrounds a modern construction project. Health and Safety wouldn’t have been that high on the agenda, either. Amazingly, someone uncovered some government records from the time that outlined the names of the people that helped build it. So we now know that Robert was a mason, Patrick a blacksmith, John a carpenter, Gilmor a supplier of cheese, Copin Wif a purveyor of bread. Most important of all were Maurice, the chaplain and John, the clerk. It was so heartening to note that even as long ago as 1494, clerks had a crucial role in supporting the building of drum towers, curtain walls, outer baileys, wells and all the other components of any half-decent castle.
I had found Tarbet a fascinating, but decidedly weird place, and I came to the conclusion that it was because of its proximity to so many hills and so much water. The weather didn’t help, blanketing the town in low cloud and mist that seemed to make the myriad boats in the huge harbour restless, like wild horses tightly packed into a corral. There is no doubt that the nature of these three towns, which are broadly similar in aspect and in scale is that they are so absolutely different from anything I have seen before, as if they belong to a different country and a much earlier time which, in a sense they do, because Argyll and Sutherland is where we are told that Scotland’s history commences. I may visit this triumvirate of characterful towns again, but only when the weather improves and I can find out definitively where Para Handy, Dougie, MacPhail and Sunny Jim loaded the Vital Spark with oak-bark when they berthed on Loch Fyne.
