Cir Mhor from Glen Rosa
Well, as I said in a brief comment on Face book earlier this week, I finally got a day, if not on the hill, then certainly in amongst them. We’ve been having a lot of fine cold clear days recently and last Friday we decided to take a trip over to the Isle of Arran.
From Irvine, Arran is just a few miles away across the Firth of Clyde. Indeed, even with my poor bit of sight, with the aid of a monocular I can see the mountains at the north end of the island from my studio door. To actually get there, takes a short trip up the coast to Ardrossan where the ferry to Brodick goes from. Until a couple of years ago, it wasn’t really possible to do a serious walk on Arran in a day trip during the winter months. The winter ferry service was somewhat restricted and for me at least, there wasn’t enough time between first and last ferry. Now though, there is an early ferry leaving at 7.00am and, and a later ferry back from Brodick.
Glen Rosa, Isle of Arran
So then, with the temperature at -4C and the first light just appearing, we went on board and went straight to the café ..you can get an excellent breakfast on board and it sets you up nicely for the day ahead. It takes about 55 minutes to get across to Brodick and by the time we walked down the gangway the sun was lighting up the tops of Goatfell and it’s neighbours …all of which were covered with snow. It looked stunning. We hadn’t at this stage decided quite what we were going to do and had carried all our winter gear incase we decided to head uphill. The scenary and colours were so good that we decided to make this a working walk and to simply take a wander the few miles up Glen Rosa in the heart of the Arran hills. With the wonderful mixture of snow, crags, grass and bracken, there would be plenty of scope for photographs and sketching.
The walk along the front and around the edge of the golf course at Brodick is scenic enough in these conditions but as we approached Glen Rosa it was just spectacular. On the north facing slopes the snow was all the way down to the base of the glen, on the southern slopes the lower levels were free of snow and the grass and bracken was a mixture of bright ochres, yellows and terracotta in the low early morning sun light.
Glen Rosa, Isle of Arran
After about a mile the glen takes a sharp dogleg to the right and you can see all the way up the glen to Cir Mhor – a wonderful pointy peak at the head of the glen that incidentally, is as pointy at the tip as it looks …but that’s another tale. At this point we were out of the shade and into bright sun and so it seemed a good point to do some sketching and just enjoy our surroundings. Then disaster ….I thought I’d packed my sketchbook and drawing pen …well, I’d got the sketchbook, but the pen I’d picked up was not a drawing pen ..it was a thicker indelible marker pen! Oooops. That’s the joy of fuzzy sight for you! Oh well, nothing for it, I’d just have to draw with this …but it wasn’t very successful and although that day I did three drawings – all of them were dreadful. What do they say about bad workmen always blaming their tools?
Despite this, it was a great day and a very useful one for me. I came away with several new ideas for paintings and although the drawings weren’t great, just sitting and looking at the hills and glen with my monocular really helps when it comes to painting later.
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Like the rest of the country, Irvine has been pretty cold for the last three weeks now, despite the influence of the Gulf Stream!
My friends’ wife having pre-booked their car for Friday, we went by train. This meant an early start, catching the 06.30 train from Irvine and arriving in Largs just 50 minutes later …while it was still dark!Not really good for me as the limited bit of sight I have deteriorates very rapidly as the light fades. In the dark I am almost totally blind …. but as we had to walk a way through town to get to the start of the path we were taking, it wasn’t too bad.
Once off the path the snow was quite deep and up on the tops … even deeper. Under normal conditions this is very rough ground and this had now filled with snow. If it had been compacted and hard it would have made for great walking but instead the snow had an icy top layer covering in places, two feet or so of loose soft snow. It was hard and very slow work at times trying to force a way through it and we quickly realised our initial plan to walk over several of the hills wouldn’t be possible. Instead we decided just to try and get to the first summit …Brown Hill at 388 m. This sounds a grand place but in reality is no more than a slightly high bump in a huge area of frozen bog and moor. But if really didn’t matter. The views, both distant and close up were amazing. The snow was sculpted into amazing shapes by the wind and was covered by animal tracks.
We returned towards the main track as the sun was setting and were once again treated to a colourful display as the setting sun turned some of the hillside a beautiful shade of pink and purple. The final walk back towards the town was accompanied by the reassuring crunch and clink of our crampons on the thick ice
As I’ve said on a few occasions, I’ve really not been getting out walking as much as I used to. The excuse is that I’ve just been too busy this year. But that’s really not good enough. I’m getting unfit and I rely on the walks for the information needed for my paintings.
We were looking down on the main road so familiar to us ….and suddenly it looked very small against the vastness of Rannoch Moor and the hills of the Black Mount. This day though, wasn’t just about walking and trying to get some fitness back into aching leg muscles, it was also about trying to get some new information for paintings.
Until around 1990 my sight was very good. Then as it deteriorated I found that I had to interpret what I saw in a completely different way. This has taken quite a lot of adjustment over many years and now after a lengthy period of fairly stable vision, I move around with surprising ease, particularly in places that are familiar to me.
It was an amazing day. The moors themselves are quite beautiful, wild and generally feature-less but in places with expansive views out towards the Glasgow conurbation. It was a stunning day weather wise too, with bright sunshine and large roving rain showers, producing amazing colours and contrasts. The most mind blowing bit though was the turbines. Man made as they were; set in this bleak landscape, I found it almost impossible to assess their size, and the distance between each of them. They were in fact, huge, each one of them around 55m high and each one with three colossal 45m blades. With my sight so limited I could only see the nearest of the turbines and so as we walked through this massive moor land site, the views were almost always the same to me. It reminded me of what they say about the universe ..it looks the same from where ever you are.
Well, the Courtyard Studios Open Weekend has come and gone ….the studio is back to normal now …if a little bit tidier and cleaner than it was this time last week. But it really wasn’t the most successful of weekends. The visitor numbers were well down and so were sales. I guess it’s just a sign of the times.
Last Thursday I received an email from Irene, a member of our local mountaineering club Air na Creagan. It said that a group from the club were heading up to Arrochar to walk Ben Donich. Wow, this is a great little hill and I was desperate to get out. With everything taking off at the studio this year I’ve really not been doing the walking I used to. …But, I have too much on at the moment and so decided reluctantly that I couldn’t join them. It was a shame because as I say, it’s a great little hill …not that I saw much of it the first time we went there, about four years ago.
I took the decision back in 1990, when my sight first started to deteriorate, to carry on hill walking come what may. Initially I bought myself a traditional walking stick in the hope that it would give me support as well as tell me a little of what the ground in front of me was doing. My partner Anita took on the job of guide. Well we found we could still walk on the hill like this albeit very slowly, but I really wasn’t sure about the sense of what I was doing and really wasn’t very confident.
