She and a friend had been here a week, she told me. There was a young woman standing in the door of the bothy with an antler in her hand, and I went to say hello. The point about bothies is not that they are free, but that they are in places where there is nowhere else. When I last came this way, Cruib was close to dereliction, but it has been taken in hand by the Mountain Bothies Association and is habitable again. Halfway along the shore of the loch, after two or three hours’ walking, I came upon a small croft tucked into a little bay. As I mounted yet another ridge, I would surprise small herds of deer or wild goats, and they would freeze for a moment, as if they’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t. Sometimes I could follow the slippery foreshore, with bladderwrack seaweed crackling beneath my feet like distant gunfire, but sometimes rocky scarps forced me inland, through swathes of chest-high bracken and tussocky fields of bog cotton, studded with orchids but also with ankle-traps of sudden boggy hollows. It is not for the fainthearted, for the loch is convoluted in the extreme, ragged with bays and promontories, and there is no trace of any trail. My aim was to follow the northern shore of Loch Tarbert, to walk into the wilds. The island is split almost perfectly in two by a sea loch, with the northern half housing perhaps fewer than 10 people. My goal was the island’s remote north-west coast, to revisit those places that had captivated me a generation ago – and would take a whole day of hard walking to reach. Photograph: David Lyons/Alamy Photograph: David Lyons/AlamyĪfter a night in the hotel in the village of Craighouse, tucked in a little sheltered bay protected by the Small Isles, I set off to the north, the sea to my right, the great granite domes of the Paps of Jura to my left. Glengarrisdale Bay on the north end of Jura. This is an island almost the size of the Isle of Wight, yet with only a thousandth of the population. The west of the island is completely uninhabited there are just a bare handful of bothies, abandoned for generations. It has just one single-track road (with a strip of grass down its middle), it has one small village, one hotel, one distillery. Islay does have its wild places, but Jura looks bleak and desolate in comparison, and that is part of its attraction. Though so close, the two islands have their own utterly distinct character. As we crossed the sound and began to close on the islands, the hills began to gather together form and colour, and emerge from their blue haze. I watched the gannets plunge-diving into the churning waters of our wake, then turned and fixed my eyes forward on our destination. Five years later, when life in London began to go horribly wrong, it was Jura that called me back and I spent a week walking the deserted west coast of the island, sleeping wherever I found myself.Īnd here I was, a quarter of a century later, once again making the two-hour ferry crossing from Kennacraig on the mainland to Port Askaig on Islay, from where it’s a five-minute hop to Jura. On Jura, my dilapidated old bike broke down, and I fell in love with the place.
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