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The last sight of the sun for several days would be at Fidden which is about as far south and west as you can be on Mull without getting wet feet.
It’s only just a handful of miles along the coast from the Ardlanish Weavers beach. The site is a wide, close cropped grassy area, without pitch markings. You just find a spot and spend the rest of the time looking at the sea and holding onto anything that would blow away. It is very exposed.
Looking west there’s the coast of Iona close by and to the south, the bay is full of islets which are partially submerged at high tide.
The campsite seemed to be full of elderly dog walkers who didn’t seem to do any dog walking and elderly kayakers who did lots of low risk kayaking at high tide.
What it doesn’t have is a mobile phone signal that EE customers can find. We were completely isolated 😱. No signal for a few hours can be tolerated but it really is hard for longer than that. The DAB radio was useless, FM radio was full of stations talking in at least two languages that sounded Gaelic maybe and on MW, both Radio5 frequencies were faint.
So we talked to each other.
Then we went to Iona. The ferry leaves from Fionnphort at the western tip of the Ross and only takes 10 minutes.
We didn’t go there as pilgrims but to appreciate the beauty of the island. It isn’t hard to do that. It’s a short walk to the north where there are white sandy beaches all around the northern end and around to the west. The sea was turquoise and the people scarce.
We bought our sandwiches from the St Columba larder, named after the abbot and evangelist who spread the Christian word across Scotland and founded the abbey on the island.
We walked past the building housing the Iona Community. Their current leader, John Bell, often features on the Radio 4 Today programme’s Thought for the Day slot.
After a beach lunch we followed the coast south, trying to walk the high water mark but were eventually diverted up onto the boggy ground and continued at a higher level
We met Vicky from Bradford on Avon, a place familiar to me as I have stayed there and worked nearby. The most memorable evening in Bradford on Avon was in 2005 watching Liverpool beat Inter Milan on penalties in the Champions League final (Dudek saved a penalty with arms that seemed longer than his body).
Today’s top tip is for successful business relationship management. Take your client to the pub the night his or her team win a top European title.
Vicky said she was very glad to walk along with us. The going was tricky due to lack of a path and surprise drop-offs and sudden boggy ground. We often had numerous attempts to ‘get to the other side’ but the chats helped and we covered plenty of ground both literally and metaphorically.
Waiting at the end of the walk was an Ionian (sic) cream tea. Perfect reward.
The ferry is a walk-on affair which is well organised except for the curious wearing of face masks during the crossing. This is bizarre given that all passengers are on the deck and it was so windy that I couldn’t keep my cap on.
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I grabbed a pic of the Pretender next to the authentic version.
There’s about 25 years in age between these vehicles but perhaps about a hundred years of technology. Or maybe more accurately, there’s zero lines of computer code in mine and a million in the new Defender!
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