Arran

Tales from a Scottish Isle

As followers of this Blog will know, I am up in Bonnie Scotland just off the Ayrshire coast on the beautiful Isle of Arran. Know as Scotland in miniture, Arran has just about something to offer everybody, from Golfing (waste of a good walk) to rock climbing calling in on canoeing, cycling and walking on the way. There are also nearly 50 caches on the isle which measures only about 30km by 15 and rising up to 874m (Goat Fell). We are staying in a lovely house on the shore of Lamlash Bay overlooking Holy Isle.

Team Balders has been to Arran a few times in the past and we have managed to find a few of these caches including an FTF after 9 months (wouldn't last nine minutes back home - eh, Graham?)

There is a series of caches on the island called "Arran Industries" with caches place need sites of past and present industries on the isle. For such a small place, it's had a lot of stuff happening, including the obvious Whisky, cheese and fishing to Barytes (?), sand, coal and satellite technology (I may have made one of those up.) Each cache has a number which somehow give the co-ordinates of the bonus cache (quarry). Anyway, I've been slowly picking away at these but totally failed to find Coal (listed on Terracaching) so am unable to complete the series. I have e-mailed the cache owner (CO) a number of times but he is yet to reply.

I have also been trying for an FTF this week but with little success. King Hakon, on the nearby Holy Isle, is a puzzle cache which I was sure I had cracked but on the ground it just wasn't right. Again, I've contatcted the CO but it's the same guy as already mentioned so that's that one scrubbed.

Another puzzle, Teddy's Picnic also looked promising with no logs on Geocaching.com. I solved the puzzle and drove into the hills to look for this one. There was the cache just where it should be so I opened the log - to find that someone had logged it five days earlier! Perhaps they're still on holiday and haven't got the luxury of mobile internet so that one's on the watchlist.

Looking further down the GSAK list I spotted Ard Bheinn - Into the Volcano. No logs but on the top of a 512m extinct volcano. There are no paths on this hill so it was going to be hard going, then on the day, the clouds and rain came down. I was going to make the ascent today but a new friend, JackieC, told me of a new Arranach cache, Blue Lagoon, so I went for the easier option and finally bagged my long deserved FTF. How sad am I? I changed my Facebook profile to ... at 350m signing a log as FTF while at GZ! (and I took a photo.)

JackieC, also enjoys caching on Arran and was a little worried that I was going to beat her to the Arran Industries series, but with my earlier DNF, it's her's for the taking next week when she is on Arran - good luck girl.

The geo-mutt and I have walked many kilometres this week over terrain including sandy beaches,
grassy glens, muddy swamps and boulder fields (and that is hard going). The dog is totally knackered so we're having an easy day tomorrow. All this walking should be good practice for the upcoming Blackburn Letterbox trail - if it doesn't kill me first!

Well that's enough for now - I dare say I'll have more to add when I get back to Brum.