Every time we stop I seem to decide this is my new favourite view 🙂
This morning we woke, breakfasted and headed off. We debated stopping for milk at the supermarket but the little Spar in the village was closed and we decided not to drive round to the Costcutter, we also decided not to bother filling up with water at the public loos. Both were slightly wrong decisions retrospectively but we’ve managed on limited milk and water supplies.
We are rather better organised with vague route planning for the coming days instead of last weeks drive up, then along, then back down type notions so this morning we were heading for Knockan Crag which is geologically a Very Important Place as it was here, way back in the 1800s that two geologists very famously came to understand about how our landscape was formed. We’ve been doing lots of learning this week which has been great – interesting all round as we’ve all been finding out stuff but also great for me and the kids as we have really missed spending time together exploring and educating ourselves. We’d already read the leaflet for Knockan Crag so had a good basic grip of what was learnt here – that the rock formations with older rocks on top of younger rocks happened when plates collided forming mountains with younger rocks slipping over the older ones. Ady is the only one of us terribly interested in recent history (I personally have no real interest in Tudors, world wars or Romans. There, I said it!) but all of us are very interested in pre-history, early people, land before time and geology type stuff so this was fascinating.
Knockan Crag is one of the many free gems we have discovered already up here, free, excellent, full of information and education and just really well done. Just like the woodland trails yesterday you can tell this has been done with passion, enthusiasm, by people who really care about their subject matter and want to share it with others. We arrived at lunchtime so had something to eat first, used the toilets (a fab stone building with living roof, toilets and sinks all using water collected from the hillside, therefore a bit brown and not suitable for drinking but *exactly* as all toilet and washing facilities should be) and decided to stay here overnight as there are no signs to say we can’t.
We set off up to the Rock Room which is an open sided, turf roof space with a large sillouette board to tell you all the various hills and mountains around with names, how to pronouce them, what they mean (they are all Gaelic), how tall they are and so on, and loads of information about geology including comic strips explaining John Horne and James Peach’s discoveries, putting the history of the earth into a 45 year old woman’s timeline (eg humans arrived last week, dinosaurs came when she was 42, first rocks were formed when she was 5 and so on), rocks under magnifying glass to show how they have been shaped and formed and loads more.
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Then a choice of 3 trails – the shortest taking you to the quarry, the medium one to the Moine Thrust and the Crag Top trail which is over an hour and climbs right to the top. Naturally we did them all :). Loads of fab features including rock sculptures, poetry and prose inscribed into stones, information boards and of course stunning views.
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We reached Willow again, having looked down on her from very high and took advantage of our being back in the van again so early to cook a decent dinner. We had steak pie (van-made pastry and tinned steak) roast potatoes (tinned potatoes) and chocolate chip cookies to follow (van made using a packet mix). Scarlett and I did that while Ady and Davies looked at some of Davies stories he’s been writing and illustrating while we’ve been on the road. Davies spent ages this morning writing himself out sums and doing them which rather amused me :).
Dinner was really nice, we all shared the last can of coke from the fridge too – Ady and I had some vodka in ours which neither of us actually like much but we’d brought along from home as we somehow had a bottle in the chiller. Have added apple juice to our rather long shopping list for when we next hit a supermarket so we can make Bobs 😆
The sun was just starting to set then so we decided to take a dusk walk in the hopes of seeing wildcats which apparently can be a possibility here. I strongly suspected we would not as we are utterly incapable of being quiet despite all our best intentions but the view and the thrill of being out with bats swooping over our heads was more than enough to make it worth the chill.
Back to the van for hot chocolate and stories (we’ve started Matilda, we all love Roald Dahl) and then bed all round. I have sporadic signal so flickr is being stroppy but I am managing to blog and will hopefully get pictures uploaded tomorrow.
You can teach me geology now 😉
Comment by Kirsty — 28 September 2011 @ 6:48 pm