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This was a wet day, once in a while it cleared and it was
fine by the time we got back, but that was small consolation.
We had six explorers: Adrian, Benjamin, John Donaldson, Katie,
Peter William and Thomas with Ann, Craig, Ilanora and Pamela
and two expedition dogs, Bruce and Sally(?)
We started out in pouring rain up the track which leads to
Ben Resipole. We stopped just after the first stile to look
at the outline of an old house next to the stream and then
climbed up the hill towards the power lines where there was
an area of old cultivation under the trees. On the way up,
Craig found a fine dragonfly, and a grasshopper, immobilised
on the heather by the cold, and there was a toad crawling
about nearby. Leaving the woods we crossed the hill to the
site of an ancient circular house, then occupied by two ponies,
and we all looked at a series of cairns on the open hill.
All of these cairns, and the house, had a fine view of Dun
Ghallain down Loch Sunart to the west.
We cut through the woods back to the track and saw some terraces
on the hillside and also the deep ravine, where some very
rare lichens grow on the trees. John Donaldson and Peter Willian
found a wood ants' nest, and they could smell the formic acid
squirted at them by the angry ants. Following the river down
to the gate some of us found some for slag from the old bloomery
iron smelting which took place there hundreds of years ago.
Before packing up everyone gathered on the beach to hear about
an accident which took place about 150 years before on a boat
in Resipole Bay.
John
Dye
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