| I don’t expect
endless sunshine but I confess to being a little narked when
we have a forecast for warm weather all over Scotland and
it turns out cold and wet again. This was another such occasion,
although we got away with light showers for the most part.
This was a big expedition, with twelve explorers: Alexander,
Daibhidh, Fern, Isabella, Jamie, JJ, Kayla, Lexi, Mairi, Michael,
Rowan and Stuart, with Adam, Fiona, Sam, Sharon, Sheila and
Simon as helpers plus Basil, Cody and Fizz putting in eleven
paws between them.
We started from Eilidh’s house at the end of Shielfoot
and it took a bit of time to get all the cars organised before
we set off across the saturated ground down the river. Alan’s
sheep were horrified to see so many people and dogs going
by but they lost interest when they realised we were not shepherding.
The path down the river was more difficult and boggier than
I remembered it and I was sorry to see that the fishing hut,
with Lita’s signature and the fisherman’s poem
in it, was now no more, but on the plus side, the tide was
high so I didn’t have to worry about the roaring waterfall
this time.
Another of my concerns was the transition across the slippery
rocks to the foreshore, but we negotiated a safe, if tricky
route across the moss and all arrived injury-free at the start
of the village.
The first excitement was the discovery of a heap of feathers,
which looked like a construction kit to make a herring gull.
I reckoned it marked the spot where a peregrine falcon had
plucked a recently killed gull and several explorers took
large feathers as souvenirs. There was a conversation about
how to turn a feather into a pen at this point, but I don’t
know if any explorers carried the experiment further.
We carried on along the shore, passing a row of buildings,
which were almost certainly used for the fishermen to store
their gear, and a bit further along we reached the old cairn.
This was an ancient cairn, several thousand years old, which,
like the cairn at Strontian, had been used for graves at a
later date. It was said locally that the last man buried there
was a sailor who had died in an accident on a boat. I told
the explorers that Morag MacNaughton had visited the place
on a Sunday School Treat many years before.
By this time, people were beginning to get wet and chilled
and maybe my route straight up to the top of the hill was
not met with universal glee, but up we went, pausing to look
for the corn kiln along the edge of the ravine. We didn’t
find it this time and we will look harder on the next visit.
It was a long drag up the hill but then we were level with
the top of the old village and all the explorers took a while
examining the highest house, which was quite large. I remembered
reading that one of the houses was occupied by a tailor who
sat on a flat stone in front in sunny weather, but a lot of
the houses seemed to have suitable seats so we couldn’t
be sure which one it was.
There are at least a dozen houses in the village and we went
slowly down the hill examining as many as we could. Finally
we stopped outside a large house near the bottom where we
had our long-awaited Tunnock’s wafers. There was a sad
story about Shielfoot which might have involved that house
and I told them how, in 1856, a young woman, who had recently
had a baby, became delirious and left the house in the middle
of the night and died of exposure on the hill. It was particularly
sad since she was almost certainly suffering from a sickness
from which she would have died, but her relatives were devastated
by her loss, for which they wrongly blamed themselves. I would
like to find out more about the baby, who was a Cameron, and
born on 13th March 1856.
We made another attempt to find the corn kiln along the burn
but it didn’t turn up, although we found several more
buildings I hadn’t seen before. Then we squelched back
along the path to Shielfoot and then the Tea Room. Not everyone
was able to stay but I got some nice drawings, I picked out
Kayla’s view of the explorers looking very happy in
the sunshine – she assured me that it did come out once.
John Dye
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