On Day 2 of the walk, we drove back to the car park in Clonaig and then retraced our steps to Clachan ... on foot. This was a somewhat strange experience, as it interrupted the sense of forward momentum, but it was nice to have already checked in and unpacked in Clachan before we arrived there at day's end.
The car park serves a ferry, so two of us went down to explore a rocky beach:
Meanwhile, Poppy made a new acquaintance in the parking lot, each greeting the other with the usual courtesies (i.e., sniffing each other's rear end). It could have been the start of a beautiful friendship - but alas, it was not to be, as duty called Poppy to join her master and three other bipeds for the walk to Clachan.We'd seen this sign on a fenced off power generation type area in Tarbert as we tried to find a shortcut to our B&B, and I thought it seemed a little more graphic explicit than signs I'd seen in the U.S. So when I saw it on a power pole in Clonaig, I captured it for posterity.
As it turned out, these signs were practically a dime a dozen on the way. But still, it made me think of a court opinion I read recently, involving two teenage trespassers who broke in or climbed into a fenced-off "no trespassing"storage area for out-of-service trains. They apparently climbed on top of one of the cars and were zapped by electricity arcing from the catenary overhead - and were very badly burned. As I recall, the theory of liability involved the train company's knowledge of the dangers of arcing, and the general public's ignorance thereof. The jury seems to have concluded, among other things, that "no trespassing" signs were not sufficient warning of the danger of death by arcing electricity. In any event, that case is likely to be appealed, so it remains to be seen what the final outcome is. Who knows what the liability laws are in Scotland, but I can't help thinking that if these yellow pictograms don't get the message across, I don't know what will.The day was partly cloudy and rainy, but still with patches of sun from time to time:
The weather made for a silvery gray on gray when we looked to the islands. A ferry is on its way here:
A perhaps more light-hearted sign here.
We did not see any sheep in the road today, despite the sign. However, on Day 5, we walked along a road and saw some sheep ahead of us who had wandered out of their pasture and were enjoying the grass on our side of the fence (the grass is greener on this side of the fence, apparently). As we continued to walk forward, they saw us, ran onto the road and bolted further down the road in the same direction that we were going. So they got ahead of us, and then fearfully looked back to see what we were doing. We were still walking forward, so they bolted again!Throughout the day, we saw these very cool orange fungi on the path. They looked almost like pieces of plastic at first:
We saw three large lovely lochs on this day:
And, of course, plenty of heather (I think that's really makes walking in Scotland so worthwhile):
We stopped by this loch for lunch:
After lunch, we came to our first forest. It felt like a fairyland, with lush (but not dense) greenery and bright (but not birch) bark:
This is what the Kintyre Way markers look like:
And here was the one artwork we saw on the Kintyre Way - I really like the suspended droplets:
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