On and on and on... -- three weeks later! (part two)

Hiya!

This is the second part of a long post about my friend T.'s visit and our two excursions.

Oban has given me some truly wonderful, generous, helpful friends, who have made my life here a pleasure. One of them, R., even lent me her car on Tuesday of the previous week, to take my friend T. on a drive down to Kilmartin Glen, which is the most amazing valley full of some of the most ancient human traces anywhere. The best way to see it would probably be by light aircraft on a calm day...
At the end we drove on right down to the Crinan Canal and to Crinan for tea and chocolate cake.
Again, we were incredibly lucky with the weather: after a tour of Kilmartin House Museum and a bowl of soup at the café there, we enjoyed walking across the glen to look at circles of standing stones and other traces of a people who must have lived here six, seven, maybe eight thousand years ago. At least one of the big stones in the circle nearest to the Kilmartin House Museum has deep, cup-shaped hollowings-out. Why? The reason lies shrouded in the past... (no, it's not a cop-out -- this is truly a mystery no-one is likely to ever resolve.)Nearby are several prehistoric cairns, most of which contain a so-called "kist" in the middle, which may date from much earlier than the cairn itself.
There is at least one ring of standing stones in a sea of rounded rocks:

The one above has got a double spiral carved into it. (Both photos: Temple Wood, South Ring)

It was quite warm, as I said. House martins and swallows flitted about our feet, feeding on the insects just above ground.
(By the way, click on the header of this post and you'll be taken straight to the Kilmartin House Museum website, which is well worth a visit! Amazing history in this neck of the woods...)
When we had seen enough stones, we walked back to the car and drove down across the raised bog, one of Europe's biggest continuous raised bogs, to the Crinan canal, turned left and found this:Dunadd Fort is the place where the first kings of the Scotti, having arrived from Ireland, established their stronghold in the seventh/eighth century AD. It was quite a steep climb to the top, but what a fascinating piece of rock there, with a footprint carved in it [comment added many months later: what a shame this is not the original but a concrete cast, the original being away in a museum in Edinburgh, where it is being kept safe from tourists' feet]:Here's T. about to try it for size...And what a view! This river, by the way, now does not flow south-west into Loch Crinan, as would seem logical, but north-east up into Loch Fyne (if I'm not totally mistaken). Natural causes, to do with geological upheavals, the melting of a huge ice cap and the ground rising as the weight came off -- or so I believe. I do wish I had the time to find out more about all these details... Please feel free to send in your information, comments, criticism... :)
Another look at the footprint; not far from that slab is a stone with a deep cup carved into it. Don't tell me there's not some ritual significance here.
On my way down I found the well -- a stone well it was, literally:
You will know how much I like Crinan. It's another really special place, but of the more modern kind. Still, there's a timelessness about it...
[I'll add some photos here later. It's getting late.]
T. and I enjoyed a cup of coffee there, sitting out on the terrace overlooking the marina.
The sky's floodgates opened as we drove up towards Kilmelford, where A & C gave us a cup of tea and a wee blether. A superb day out.

As I originally typed these lines about a week ago, I was also listening to a broadcast on BBC Radio3 of a concert with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra founded by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim. What a sound, and what a message of understanding, curiosity and sheer humanity! They have overcome so many unimaginable obstacles to continue playing together and to perform where no Israeli had performed before, where no Palestinian had performed with an Israeli before. During my visit to Oban last October I attended a concert that raised funds to help the orchestra buy new instruments. The owner of one of two music shops here has a son who is currently working with them as a music teacher (I think), and they knew then he was going out there and would be able to take restored instruments and equipment with him. A very worthy cause.

I'm still hard at work, have not worked this hard, ever! Another deadline looming ahead, with two very difficult translations and rather lengthy ones, to be done by next Sunday evening. It's been a really hard slog but I've stuck with it against my better judgment because the project matters to me and is very interesting -- a three-volume book about an architect duo from eastern Switzerland. But some of the work conditions have been quite dreadful and have not made my life easy over the past several months. Nuff griping, however.
I have much to be grateful for: good health, a healthy appetite (yes, I'm eating very well, slight changes to my diet in the sense of less potato crisps/chips, which is good: everything here is much blander, ready-to-eat things have less salt, but are a lot greasier, so I do most of my own cooking. I don't like ready-to-eat stuff anyway: too many preservatives, too much packaging. I've been buying a lot of berries and would buy even more, but again there is soooo much packaging, unbelievable! And I know it's only going to the dump just outside town, at the top of the hill, not even into an incinerator that would at least generate some heat, but tossed onto a huge pile of rubbish some later generation will have to sort out. So I do try to minimise the amount of packaging that I take in.

More some other time. Another week of really hard work, and then it's back to my normal, still busy schedule, which should allow me to get my diy disaster taken care of -- the floor is slowly, slowly returning to a natural wood colour, but I can only do a small portion at any one time to keep the horrible fumes of the paint remover down to a manageable level.

Take care. Thanks for your comments, if you care to leave any. :)
Peace!