Of bike rides, rain-washed hills and bats

Yesterday Toad and I drove to the Pier Cafe at Stronachlachar beside Loch Katrine, stoked up on coffee and cake (well, Empire Biscuit in my case. I test them wherever I go if they look appetising enough. Stronachlachar's got 9.5 just trailing behind the 10-er at the Perch Cafe in Garelochhead. My gran's, which we called Grandma biscuits, are the benchmark against which all others are held), and set off in light rain to cycle round the Stronachlachar end of the loch and along the north side to Trossachs Pier where we would hop on the boat, Lady of the Lake, to come back to where we started.

At the start of the trail we met a couple in a pickup truck closing a barrier across the road. They said it was the first day in a week that they'd been able to drive out because of landslides blocking the road. We have had very heavy rain, even for Scotland, over the last week or so. The extent of the devastation became evident very quickly as we rode along. Toad, who had done this ride early in August, was shocked at the difference from the idyll he had seen just three weeks ago.



Officially the road was still closed to cars (it's a private road anyway so there is never a lot of traffic) but we carried on. We didn't meet anyone coming the other way until we were over half way along the twelve and a half mile track. Toad's phone app logging mileage actually recorded 14.77miles but officially the distance seems to be 12.5.


While we were still on the south side of the loch hillside scars from landslides on the other side were very visible. Flood plains had been well flooded too, leaving grass caught in trees and on fences. I hoped no-one had been in the white car (see below) when it got washed against the trees.



I recorded a short burst of the sound of this wee burn and tried to imagine the noise as land slipped and what had been small streams burst, quite literally, their banks.

It was still bonny looking down to the loch through the trees and the downhill sections of our ride, standing on the pedals and whizzing down at ~25mph, were great fun. Toad was impressed with my uphill efforts too. My recent rides to and from Garelochhead seem to have improved my fitness at that.

After half way we began to meet other cyclists coming the other way so readiness for braking had to be maintained during downhill whizzings. People starting at Trossachs Pier, where some had hired bikes, had been told that they wouldn't be able to cycle all the way to Stronachlachar. We told them they could.

Towards the end of our ride I enjoyed some moss banks of the kind that I remember reading about in poetic writing of old.

We had tea and scones at Stronachlachar when we disembarked from Lady of the Lake and I untied the string that I'd used for cycle clips because it was needed to tie the car number plate to Toad's bike on the back of the car. 

To finish off our day out we drove along to Inversnaid because we were so near. The noise of the waterfalls there was quite something and the view across Loch Lomond to the Arrochar Alps showed us how close to home we really were.

We then trundled, because I was driving (Toad never drives in a trundly way even when I wish he would so it's best if I drive bumpy roads) and happy to go gently on the single track road alongside Lochs Chon and Ard, back to Aberfolye and then homeward. There was a pause in proceedings when we stopped, along with a few other cars, to see if we could help dislodge an ambulance from the roadside mud. All that rain last week has created general mega-squelch once you're off road. Unfortunately a number of shoulders shoving together was not enough. The ambulance probably needed a pull by a tractor or some vehicle with a winch. Fortunately there was no-one needing hospital treatment in the ambulance at the time it got stuck. I think a boat ambulance had been sent to where help was needed instead. The sun had come out by afternoon and there was hardly any breeze so a New Zealander, an offerer of one of the shoulders mentioned above, and who had not had much weather luck during his Scottish holiday, decided to have a swim in the mirrored water of Loch Chon while he had the chance.

I don't often take alcoholic drinks because of medication I take for arthritis but I had a cider when we got home and slept like a log so wasn't aware of the bat in the bedroom until I woke up and opened the curtains. It had probably settled on the curtains so opening them disturbed it. I opened the windows too and after flying round and round the room  a lot it eventually went out by the window.

Windows wide to let out the bat

We know bats live in at least one of the walls of the house and a couple got into the house some years ago when there was a hole in one of the walls by the stairs after a bathroom pipe had been replaced. This time I think it must have crawled through elbow hole in Toadlet's room (damp plasterboard, teenage elbow; need I say more?). It's possible there's bat in her room too but she's still asleep.

Toadlet moves on

Toadlet grew up. Yesterday we drove her and her essential clobber over to her Edinburgh student digs. We forgot pillows so Toad was sent out for those and I was given the task of stashing the kitchen bstuff and clothes in appropriate places. Sitting in her room at her desk ready for Freshers' Week she looked to be in her element.

From the kitchen of the student flat there is a close view of Salisbury Crags and another, across East Lothian and along the Firth of Forth, to North Berwick Law (phone pics so kept small).


We have a good feeling about this phase of her life. Go, Toadlet!

Mid-morning we left Toadlet to get stuck into her new life and head towards Newhaven to visit J-of-the-Wolves*, hitherto DivingDaughter on this blog, at her new flat with her partner. Their fourth floor flat has a direct view across town of Edinburgh Castle Rock and any firework displays that happen to be set off there. Neat! Items from J's past can be spotted about the flat, such as her teddy, Sha-Sha, acquired at a church jumble sale with GrandmaB in Poulton-le-Fylde when J was three. Sha-Sha had been 'pre-loved' and was subjected to a good scrubbing by Grandma. He has survived well. And then there's a piece of Welsh dressed slate that had been left at Llwyngwern Quarry, now part of the land encompassed by the Centre for Alternative Technology, where J worked for a couple of years. Hanging on one wall is a felt patchwork representation of a 10x10 Graeco-Latin square that I made some decades ago. Its colours have faded a bit. Perhaps it's time to make another in different fabrics.


After coffee at the house of J and S we all four headed off to see the Kelpies at Falkirk and then the Falkirk Wheel.

It was a landmark, lovely day altogether. Toad did all the driving and this morning has gone off to his archery coach training in Milngavie. I'm feeling that recognisable ME/chronic fatigue 'nausea' so am going to have a restful day at home enjoying my new freedom. Toadlet and I have that in common right now!

*The 'J-of-the-Wolves' reference is both to J's activity in the women's team of the Edinburgh Wolves American Football club and to the books about Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George that I read many years ago.


Signing off this post with some purple loosestrife I saw growing by the Forth and Clyde Canal near the Kelpies. I want some of this to grow with the wild angelica in the Boggy Brae garden. I've seen it in that mix elsewhere in Argyll but not near us. Time to get hold of some seed, I think.

Three weeks of summer

Toadlet and I headed south and stayed overnight with the Derbyshire branch of the family. We had time to do a bit of exploring of an old quarry where trees now grow.

Next day I took Toadlet to my sister's house in Norfolk so that she could go to a family reunion in upstate New York << with this lot. I returned to DerbyshireDaughter's house. Three days of driving left me tired so we mooched about making jam and other relaxng things for a couple of days.

using up any old bits of sugar

'Moo' made the labels

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Then we (DD and partner, 'Moo' and 'Piglet', plus me) went on a family day visit to Wentworth Castle near Barnsley in South Yorkshire. Here is 'Piglet' in front of a well-stacked wood pile.

Piglet and wood

It was turning into a hot day and his sunhat had been forgotten so I fashioned a hat for him out of my Seasalt snood – very piratical as well as practical.

Seasalt cap

Because we had also forgotten to bring sun screen, DerbyshireDaughter begged a splodge of it from another young mother for use on the fairheads and redheads of the family. Nothing like being a mum for making you bold in protecting your loved ones.

'Moo' in the children's play area

The gardens and the views from them were lovely.

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After this I went to the house where I grew up (from the day before my twelfth birthday) in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire. My mother and my youngest brother still live there, he as her carer as she has Degenerative Macular Disease and is registered blind, though she can see large things very blurred: enough to get around without walking into things, but details and small things elude her. Tom also went to the family reunion so I was taking his place for a couple of weeks.

As well as making mum's meals and doing stuff like shopping, I tidied out a few cluttered old drawers. My mum grew up during the WW2 so hoarding things that just might be useful is ingrained in her psyche (mine too, learned from her, but to a slightly lesser extent). Also, she can no longer see well enough to know clutter and tat from useful stuff.

 And so, among other things, I threw out a dozen or so plastic medicine spoons, the sort that come with every bottle of medicine. There was a fair bit of other cheap plastic cutlery too, some of it broken. I do hope Wyre Council recycle stuff like this.

It was quite fun sorting through the oldest drawers, those from my parents' first (and only) kitchen cupboard in their house in Horsforth, the part of Yorkshire where I and three of my siblings were born. Mum still has this small but practical kitchen cupboard in her pantry.

Mum's house is like a museum. The two miners' lamps are kept on a high shelf above the picture rail in the hall. They are there in memory of the paternal side of my family who were coal miners in South Yorkshire. My grandad was good with his hands and mended his own shoes. His cobbler's anvil is in mum's boiler room.

cobbler's anvil

Some of his other tools hang in the tool shed that used also to be the coal shed, and some are to be found in the garage.

old tools and bits & pieces

Another old thing, this one in the pantry on a high shelf, is an old tin of liquorice. It contains prepared liquorice roots as well as lumps of black stuff that I presume is part processed on its way to becoming liquorice Pontefract Cakes. For my dad, growing up as a young child in Featherstone, Pontefract was the great metropolis until his family moved to Leeds.

Wiki image

Which brings me in a roundabout way to mum's washing-machine. There was a faint but persistent smell in mum's kitchen. DerbyshireDaughter and I finally traced it to the washing-machine. We dosed it with vinegar and hot water a couple of times (I'm leaving instructions about this with Tom!) and then DD decided to clean the filter. Let's just say we were... amazed... and had no idea what could have caused the filter to get so black!

Later I checked the filter again and found a black round thing that reminded me of a Pontefract Cake. I think it must have been there for a while and it wasn't dissolving so I presume it wasn't a Pontefract Cake. The mystery remains.

There is an old apple tree in mum's garden, half of which is dead but the other half produces apples so the dead half is kept as a counterweight! The apples are very like Bramley cooking apples but sweeter so adding sugar to them in pies is not usually required. Windfalls are collected and left out for the milk deliverer's pigs.

windfall apples on the doorstep

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During DerbyshireDaughter's two day stay at mum's house while I was there, we went beachwards up to Fleetwood. Far less crowded there than the middle part of the Fylde coast, i.e. Blackpool, and especially on a very breezy day. We stopped near Fleetwood boating lake for model boats and small kayaks and enjoyed a windy walk on the empty beach.

'Piglet' was dead chuffed with his new sunglasses.

We found the boundary stone of the Preston and Wyre Railway. Before the railway up through Cumbria and into the west of Scotland was built, Fleetwood was the end of the line. The old hotel on the front at Fleetwood is called the North Euston Hotel.

After that the best way to get to Scotland on the west side of Great Britain was by boat.

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As well as trying to do helpful things at mum's, I managed a bit of wreckage when I slipped and fell out of the shower bringing the shower curtain rail down with me. But this was nothing compared to what happened when those at the clan gathering in Pulteney, NY assembled for a final group photo on the jetty (or dock, as they called it) at Keuka Lake.

it was all going swimmingly and then...

...even more swimmingly, you might say!

Apparently the dock had been a bit wobbly all week. No-one was hurt and those left standing found it hilarious. This family get-together won't be forgotten in a hurry! :)