The second day of our tour of Arran with Rabbies dawned a bit differently from day 1 – as you can see above. That’s the view from outside our guest house at breakfast time.
However, it was’t actually raining at breakfast time nor when we set off, so the day’s first business was a walk across Machrie Moor to the various standing stones and stone circles. These are reckoned to be at least 3,000 years old, but as usual with these things, no-one has any real idea what their purpose was. One thing is clear, however: given the number and size of the stones (that large standing stone is approaching 4 metres high), this wasn’t the work of one person working on a whim – there must have been an organised effort to create these structures, involving many people and continuing over many years, perhaps generations. So that suggests that there must have been a society, with hierarchies; someone to decide what should be done, how, and with the authority (political? religious?) to get other people to do the work; and many other people to actually do the hauling and digging. Given the thin margin of agricultural surplus that would have been available at that time, I think the society was quite large. Yet we know nothing about them.
As we were leaving the rain was starting. We then drove to the southern end of Arran and escaped the rain, reaching Drumadoon Bay near Blackwaterfoot. This was just a wide, wind-swept beach – quite evocative in the gathering gloom. After that we drove round the southern end of the island and back up the eastern side, going through Whiting Bay and Lamlash before arriving at the Wineport near Brodick Castle for lunch. We had a couple of brief stops for ‘photo ops’ on the way, but by this time it was raining steadily.
After lunch, and in view of the continuing heavy rain we did mainly indoors-y things. We visited some craft shops near the restaurant: a leather good store where Val and I each bought a new belt, and a ‘smellies’ shop – Arran Aromatics. There was also a small craft brewery, Arran Brewery, which other people in the groupl visited. Finally it was off to Lochranza at the northern end of the island for a visit to the Arran distillery. This is a new distillery, just 22 years old. Indeed, when it opened it was the first new distillery in Scotland for a very long time. It’s very small – the wash tun, the brewing vessels and both sets of stills (four in total, two used for each stage of a double-distillation) are all located in one room. Quite a contrast with the Glenfiddich distillery which we visited a year earlier!
We were dropped at our lodgings at around 5:30. After resting for a while, having a cup of tea and cleaning ourselves up, we got very wet on the short walk round to the Douglas hotel. Still, we enjoyed our meal there, we sank a bottle of Chilean Merlot, and enjoyed a dram of Arran malt to finish.
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