I began with a brief "nosy" around the centre of Tain, its stone buildings with their spiky turrets and gables. On the road out there were tempting signs for the Glenmorangie distillery. Last night I enjoyed a glass of this smooth, easy to enjoy, malt whisky.
The trail sadly turned off before I reached the source of this drink, onto a side road and eventually into forestry. It led me to the final large bridge of my trip, across the Dornoch Firth. It was a low bridge held up by many concrete piers, only completed in 1991. After walking across with mountains to my left and the grey sea, grey clouds and distant views of Dornoch to my right, I descended down an embankment to a track that followed an old, abandoned railway line. Beside me the beach of rounded pebbles had a line of blackened seaweed at the high tide mark and yellowish seaweed beside the water.
A road took me into a forest. Panels claimed that ancient people had a prosperous community here as evidence by hut circles. I climbed up a hill on which signs claimed there was one such hut circle. While there was a depression at the top, anything else was hidden by tall ferns which were trying to transfer their wetness onto me as I walked by.
Dornoch has an attractive town centre in red sandstone with a castle (now a hotel), old church and a green with some horse chestnut trees just starting to turn autumnal yellow. A finger post informed me that I still had 163 kilometres to walk on the John o'Groats Trail. After looking at different options, peering through windows were possible to judge the number of empty tables, I settled on a café for a lunch of a roast beef bagel with leaves, gherkins and a peppercorn sauce.
The Royal Dornoch Golf Course is the number one golf course in Scotland, or so a sign claimed. I walked by it as I headed up the coast, beside the sea, to the village of Embo and my campsite for the night. "Grannie's Heilan Hame" is a holiday resort with entertainment. Later in the evening, after pitching my tent by the dunes and making a meal of couscous, sultanas and tuna, I looked in at the "Showbar" to see what was happening. Too late to buy a bingo card, instead I listened to the numbers being called out over a creamy pint of keg beer. In the old days they would say things like "two fat ladies 88", or "legs 11" but this evening the numbers were announced by computer as "eight and eight, 88" or "one and one, 11". To my mind it took out the showmanship and much of the fun, maybe it is now more politically correct or maybe nobody was born when "77 Sunset Strip" was around. Bingo was followed by one of the "Troupers" singing. He was trying hard but after a few songs I wisely decided against another pint and headed to my tent. Before slipping into my sleeping bag I climbed the dune behind my tent, away from the campsite lights and looked at the stars over the sea, the faint line of the milky way visible, and distant lights on some far shore.
No comments:
Post a Comment