Under the Cobbler

We went to Cardross today for the funeral of a friend and colleague, Nigel Price, who was my opposite number at Crarae Garden, near Inveraray. He was only 60 and had been suffering with bone marrow cancer for some while. A sad occasion, but it was a humanist ceremony to commemorate his life and so it turned out to be quite positive.

On the way back along Loch Long I found a gap in the trees to look across the loch to the relatively new and very large Ardgarten Hotel, built rather controversially in the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park on the site of the old Youth Hostel. Behind the hotel the jagged bulk of the Cobbler, or Ben Arthur to give it its Sunday name, rises to the clouds. The gap between the hills marks the route of the hill pass into old Argyll, the Rest and Be Thankful.