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The last expedition of the year, I never know if anyone will
turn up for this one, what with Christmas shopping and parties,
but we had a good crew: five explorers, Alexander, Fern, Maighsi,
Roanna and Rowan, plus Kate, Mairi and Sharon but not a single
dog.
It was five years since we had visited the Low Road in winter
and I thought there was a chance of seeing some interesting
birds, but they didn't turn up. We had a very wet time and
many puddles were jumped in very early in the day so some
explorers were rather damp by the end.
We made our way through the glaur and pools along the road
to the loch side where Rowan spied a pair of interesting wheels
in the water, which turned out to belong to agricultural equipment
of some kind. A bit further on we passed the remains of an
old van that is slowly disappearing into the ground. All along
the way the explorers were noting the groups of funerary cairns
where people had rested when carrying coffins on the way to
St Finan's Isle.
Eventually we reached the end of the road but this time we
didn't go up to the main road but took a diversion round the
back of the fence to look for mica.
During World War II there had been investigations into the
local mica deposits and this was a site where some nice crystals
of white mica, or muscovite, had been found. The ground was
very broken up by cattle and it took a bit of time to work
round the hill to the boulders where the mica was best seen.
I had difficulty in finding any good crystals but Roanna turned
out to be quite sharp-eyed and soon had a collection of nice
flakes of mica.
Rather than cross the hill again we went straight down to
the road and all wriggled under the electric fence to get
through, after Rowan had checked that it was working. We stopped
for a wafer break and a picture before starting back along
the track to Langal.
Everyone was pretty busy in the afternoon and I was lucky
to get some pictures later on; I have picked out Fern's drawing
of three funerary cairns.
John Dye
John
Dye
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