Freedom of the road

What a fantastic weekend away with my dear friend R. in the Trossachs! The gods smiled on us, for the predicted heavy rain didn't hit until our return journey, by which time we'd had so much fun nothing could dampen our mood.

One of the reasons R. wanted me to take the new job was so I can afford to have roadtrips with her again. What times we've had! Our last roadtrip was two Eurovisions ago in Alnwick, when we scandalised the B&B owner and were asked in all seriousness 'Are you local?' when requesting a table at a cafe. Then there was the blissful roadtrip in Majorca picking marguerites, sunbathing on an empty beach, eating sardines by the sea. And before that the Gairloch trip when I picked up a 17 19 year old and kept poor R. in the next room awake half the night... We have had wonderful times together, and this was no exception.

As registered nerds, we wanna do the historical and nature-type things as well as (at least on my part) getting hammered. And so it came to pass...

We stayed at the Forth Inn in Aberfoyle, whose staff cannot be praised highly enough. They were so friendly, welcoming and warm, which made up for our tiny room. I suppose we might make a striking couple, as we're visually loud and audibly so too once we reach our stride. The dining room fell silent (cf Wicker Man) when we entered making us feel like the only gays in the village. And we're not even gay! Really!

We stayed late in the bar, then walked by the river Forth, and I later sat smoking cannybliss and reading on the balcony after R. had turned in. Thankfully, I didn't obey my impulse to squat the large and empty room off the balcony, for it was occupied later. Two people tried to lock me out on the balcony but I persuaded them I was both legitimate and quiet. Meanwhile the whole pub turfed out at 1.30 am into the car park directly opposite the polis station, and I picked up quite a lot of local colour from the conversations wafting up to the balcony.

R. and I studied the map in the bar that night to decide our itinerary, and were so fired up at the thought of the Crannog Centre that we decided to alter plans to drive up to Kenmore the next day. After a massive fish breakfast, we drove over Duke's Pass, stopping to admire orchids, cottongrass and lochans, before swapping our tickets for the Loch Katrine cruise to the next day. We're driving along some of the most beautiful and dramatic countryside known to man, playing loud music and screaming with laughter, as is our roadtrip wont, letting the 4x4's with not time to smell the roses overtake us. It shone solidly whenever we wanted to stop for a walk, and we both caught a touch of the sun.

We turned up a one-track road to Fortingall, because R. wanted to see the oldest yew in Europe in the churchyard there. What a treat! What a serendipity! This is a very strange and quite beautiful 'model village' built by a Glasgow magnate in the early 20th century near a cluster of standing stones and cairns. The cottage gardens are type-specimens, and the kirk quite stunning in a simple and clean way. It houses some Pictish/Celtic artefacts from the early Christian era and before, as well as the Yew which is reckoned to be 5000 years old.

We both 'felt' it to be an old pagan place even before knowing of its ancient past, and the hairs on the back of our necks were standing up. We counted 5 species of bumblebees grazing the cotoneaster in the kirkyard and even honeybees (in these days of Colony Collapse Syndrome). The quite wonderful historical leaflet for sale through an honesty box in the kirk alerted us to the triad of standing stone clusters in a local field. We tramped through hip-high meadow to these, where I found an unfamiliar slug in residence on the biggest stone, R. found a huge clump of four-leaved clovers, and we communed with the ancestors.

Climbing back over the gate, we found a thread-wrapped dreadlock which some fellow-traveller had left as a remembrance of their communion too, then returned to find our car blocked in by extremely courteous and pretty hot bikers.

On to the Crannog Centre on Kenmore (Loch Tay), where our charming (and totally hot) guide allowed us to ask challenging archaeological questions about these strange and mysterious structures, then made fire for us using a bow, a hazel branch and a pinewood lath. I can't recommend this educational centre enough. We learned that 9 out of 10 'islands' on Scottish lochs are crannogs (circular lodges built on stilts on water, with a causeway to the land), and made it our business to search for crannogs on every loch we passed thereafter. And boy, did we find them thereafter!

We had to make another detour to Fortingall/Glen of Lyon to seek the other standing stones and cairns we'd missed earlier. I made a spectacular misdiagnosis that a farm-dumped pudding stone with an steel shaft was a 'killed' stone before we found the real McCoy. We came across even more varieties of Bombus (bumblebees) on the deaf nettles there, and a stripey slug which I've yet to identify. The kine in the field did not break our arms, and the ewes and lambs gambolled and bleated.

We had a really shitty meal in Callander that evening, at the 'Ben Ladi Cafe', and it didn't stop our fun for a minute. Then back to the Forth Inn at Aberfoyle, where I got trashed at pool, trashed on white wine and administered some counselling to a really nice guy just a few months into separating from his wife of 16 years, before resorting to the balcony for cannybliss again, listening to the swifts'(genus Apus) chirpings and watching their swoops and dives.

That's enough for one day.