Monday, September 7th, 2009: Driving South to Loch Lomond, Scotland

The first leg of our day's drive was south along Loch Lochy toward the open sea. Since it was sunny, we stopped to take some panoramic pictures of the deep blue waters of the loch before continuing on our way.

Shortly after we passed through the town of Fort Williams, we stopped briefly to take a picture of a pretty little castle on an equally small island out in the middle of a loch. It turned out to be Aaaarghhh Castle, but that name comes from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". More traditionally, it was known as Stalker Castle and was in such good condition because it had been reconstructed in the early 1900s.

Our next stop was Dunstaffnage Castle, which was a historic site that we decided to take a quick peek at. Most of the castle's curtain wall was intact, and that was quite imposing, but on the inside many of the interior structures had fallen into ruin. As is probably true of many Scottish castles, Dunstaffnage had a long and occasionally bloody history. It changed hands at least once by murder and one other time because the local MacDougal lords backed the English in the Scottish rebellion. When the rebellion was ultimately won by Robert The Bruce, he confiscated the castle and awarded it to Clan Stewart.

A little off to the side of the ruins of the castle were the ruins of a small, old chapel. You could still see the stone arches for the old stained glass windows although the windows were long gone, of course. The surrounding forest was slowly but surely encroaching and trying to reclaim the site.

Driving along Loch Linnhe we saw the shaggy Scottish cattle close enough to the street to take some quick snapshots. I would assume that the long hair helped the cattle survive the harsh Scottish winters, which would be particularly important it they wintered out-of-doors.

Loch Linnhe was another sea loch, and on its borders we found an old iron works, originally build in 1753, which was historic site included in our Explorer Pass. The iron works included an old charcoal-fired blast furnace that produced pig iron from ore imported from central Scotland or England, refined with the charcoal obtained from the local trees and local limestone. Unlike similar sites in the U.S. where the trees were soon exhausted, the Scottish produced charcoal in a sustainable manner by coppicing off all the large branches from trees in the surrounding area in a 16 year cycle. The sheds for storage of the charcoal were far larger than the shed for the iron ore, and the basic stone structure housing the blast furnace was largely intact.

The explanatory plaques inside some of the old buildings were quite interesting. The system of using a water wheel with a huge eccentric camshaft to drive two bellows to pump air into the blast furnace looked really awkward and inefficient to me, so I was not surprised that it had been replaced by more efficient blowers fairly early in the life cycle of the iron mill. But I was surprised the mill continued to function until the 1870s, at which point it was finally shut down. The stone walls and slate roofs of the buildings had endured the next 100 years of benign neglect with surprisingly little degradation, at which point the historic trust people took it under their wing and started the restoration process.

We stopped for the night by the banks of Loch Lomond, and it was as pretty a scene as that old song would suggest. Loch Lomond is very long, fairly narrow, and quite deep, comprising the largest body of fresh water in the British Isles. It stretches many kilometers from the mountains of the highlands in the North to the rolling hills of lowland Scotland in the South, and a curvy, narrow road hugs the shoreline for that entire distance. We put up for the night at the Colquhoun Arms Hotel in Tarbet, a town sandwiched between the shoreline road and the banks of the loch. The section of the road from Ardlui at the northern tip of the loch to Tarbet was particularly twisty and demanding, so I was glad to be done with driving for the day. We both enjoyed stretching our legs by walking to the small park in the center of the town once we had moved into our room. A viewpoint on the eastern edge of the park gave us a nice panoramic view of Loch Lomond as the dusk slowly fell.