It’s time to change coasts. Having spent 4 days in the rolling, harvested landscape to the east of Edinburgh visiting the many fishing villages & towns by the North Sea, the first part of the journey follows the A1 around the capital. There, the landscape changes and the road climbs, peaks & lochs and high lands closing up around the car.

Gone are the tidy, wide-spreading, fields of golden, swaying wheat & barley & rape seed, edged with Old Man’s Beard and mixed bracken & brambles & grasses. Mountain landscapes appear with disappearing peaks lined up behind each other. Tall mixed woodland of pine & ash, oak & cedars stand imperious, dwarfing the passing traffic. Like a monks’ tonsure, they ring the heights. Breaking through to the light reveals a balding, grazed, rock-pitted landscape, contrasting light-grey, bouldered outcrops with flimsy greens of rough, pasture, yellow-studded gorse and a few stunted trees.

The road passes the sky-reflected mirrors of lochs & streams stretching for miles around the route. Loch Lomond, Loch Long, Loch Fyne break up the scenery, gleaming jewelry draped around the necks of preening peaks.

The lochs provided essential means of passage through the mountains for trade & communication and several small towns & villages are dotted around the edges. One of the most picturesque is Inverary on Loch Fyne.

Fishing may well be the source of wealth in small towns like this, as can be appreciated by the size and layout of the buildings.

After a beautiful drive of 5 hours or so, we reach the west coast and the island ferry that runs from Tayinloan to the Isle of Gigha, our final destination.

Look closely at the far-off Peaks of Jura!