Old pier, Taynuilt

I said that when I returned to Argyll, I wouldn't spend the whole time cleaning and sorting! So, on my sister Kate's day off, we decided, on the basis of a tempting glimpse from the train window, to go for a walk around the old Bonawe furnace and Inverawe, on the other side of the loch, near Taynuilt. We took the dogs, too, which is a mixed blessing. Lola (2) still isn't very well behaved. She nearly gave us a heart attack by accidentally opening the window, then jumping out and running straight across the main road, near the village. After that, it was decided that they had to stay in the boot while travelling, with a dust sheet to protect the car, as she has a habit of rolling in the nastiest smells and substances she can find. She is no more road-sensible at the house, where quarry lorries thunder up and down the narrow road throughout the day.

We started on this shore, beside the old pier. A new jetty, Kelly's pier, serves the boat Anne of Etive, which cruises Loch Etive. The ferry service originally connected the villages of Taynuilt and Bonawe (confusingly, Bonawe furnace is on the Taynuilt side) across the narrows of Loch Etive. In time, it became a car ferry, but in 1966 the ferry service ceased, following the opening of Connel bridge to cars. Connel bridge had been a railway bridge, but with the closure of the Ballachulish-Connel line, it went over to road traffic. I can still recall the pre-traffic lights era on the bridge, when a man called Tommy popped out of a hut to control the traffic with his Stop-Go lollipop sign.

But I digress. We walked past the old iron smelting furnace, past a row of cottages and the grand Bonawe house, down across a bog to the place where a high trip-trap suspension bridge crosses the Awe. I had both dogs pulling me on the lead, with Kate hanging on to my back, so I skied across!

After that we wandered along the Awe towards the hydro power station. Tyson, the other dog, dived into the wide, fast flowing river and disappeared.! Kate thought she saw his head and shoulder being carried along towards the weir, and we shouted frantically without much hope, until he came running towards us from the other direction! Honestly!

We took a road past some other less ancient cottages, to the smokehouse, where we didn't buy any trout or salmon because it's all intensively but automatically farmed now, without the creation of local jobs. There are ten fish farms on Loch Etive now, owned by the one company. We did, however, have tea and cake in the grounds, and the dogs behaved very well. I was looking for a present for my 18-year-old niece, Maria, because she'd just got her exam results, and found out she's got into the university of Thessaloniki, her first choice in Greece! Needless to say, I didn't think she'd appreciate a tea towel or a fancy bar of soap from the Inverawe shop.

We returned by a slightly different route, and almost sank into the bog a couple of times, but otherwise all was well. We took a self-guided tour around the furnace, as HIstoric Scotland was not on hand, and the signage is excellent. It's well worth a visit if you are interested in arhcitecture or industrial archeology, being a largely intact furnace where iron ore was smelted to make canonballs in the 18th and 19th centuries.

After that, we had to get home to meet Jezzie who was returning on the school bus, and on to Oban to shop. We followed that up with an evening swim on the sunlit beach at Tralee. Mmm, beautiful and SO bracing! We all had wetsuits, and there IS still a gulfstream (does it affect Loch Creran?) but it's considerably cooler than the sea in Cornwall.