|
Yet another bad day, with nasty showers of hail and rain.
Unsurprisingly, there wasn't much enthusiasm for the hill,
only Robbie L. was prepared to take it on, although we had
a good crowd of helpers: Howard, Nicky, Philippa, Richard
and Sharon with only Ellie to protect us.
I knew it was going to be a cold outing so I set a fairly
brisk pace across the hill. We started off on a well-engineered
old track, presumably used by the peat cutters in the old
days, and then struck across the heather to the boundary fence
which we followed across the moor. Then we crossed the fence
and traversed some very tussocky ground to an old oak tree
before heading up to the shoulder of the hill and crossing
to the cairn. When we were at the most exposed place we were
hit by a nasty hail shower but we just pushed on to the top.
The Resipole Cairn is a huge structure and deserves to be
better known, the trouble is that it is not conspicuous and
we had looked for it twice without success on previous expeditions.
For those of you who might want to visit it, the grid reference
is NM 7163 6470. There is a large cairn about two metres high
and about 10 metres across at the base, with a smaller cairn
built on the top. The whole structure is built of large round
stones which must have been carried up from the beach. One
part of the cairn has been altered into a rough hut and there
is a flat stone visible near the top which might indicate
the top of a passage grave, but it has not been excavated.
Once we had walked all round the cairn and seen the view up
and down Loch Sunart, we retired to a nice sheltered spot
for a wafer break and, all too soon, set off back down the
hill. We almost made it back to the cars before we were hit
by a real drenching shower, after which young Robbie called
it a day, although a smaller team went on to check out the
cave at Port na h' Uamha.
John
Dye
|
|
