Find an engine, and a smile.

I haven’t carried a camera into the hills in around four months. It wasn’t a big decision, it just happened, but I kinda know why looking back.
I started the year with a handful of eye wateringly good trips but even these were occasionally nudged around the edges by arseholes. As the year went on the arseholes seemed to be coming off the periphery and into my point of focus. In the hills and online, there was no escaping it.
I’ve been asked more times this year than all the other years I’ve been alive to look at someone’s Instagram account, and always while in the hills. Fuck off, I don’t care.
Nearly 20 years of this place now and even when it was quite literally the #1 outdoor website in the world (hilarious looking back isn’t it) never once did I ask someone out in the hills to look at my blog. You know why? I didn’t give a fuck about it, I mean just look at the view, no?

The hills have always been about the joy, the freedom, discovery, it has always filled my heart and my soul with air and lightness and I felt it was being drained away by a constant supply of soulless desperate stupids with their phones in their hands, gauging the quality of their day by the reach of their engagement through the screen.
How can you be up here and not feel that just being there is enough, does this generation have no affinity with these places, is it really just a leisure venue now?

This year I have seen drones chase away ravens from summits, a buzzard from its nest, new born lambs from their mothers, and a little of my heart from my chest.
I’ve kicked out and buried more abandoned camp fires in the Kilpatricks than all the other years I’ve  been a ranger combined. I’ve also had training with Scottish Fire and Rescue who have some senior members who think we should let the hills burn to preserve resources and money.

Plus we’ve been in and out of hospital all year. I nearly lost the love of my life and my tolerance for anything that isn’t right for me is gone.

So, off I went. Phone in pocket to preserve power for the mapping, eyes on the horizon, feet on paths new and old. I’ve rarely posted stuff, I’ve stayed off the socials. There was particular comment scunnered me and it was with some lovely photies with the original poster complaining they hadn’t had enough likes. Oh, you can fuck off too.

Then Ozzy died. The man has sung to me daily for nearly 50 years and I took it hard. Didn’t expect that at all. Black Sabbath are my heroes, but I don’t know them, but I was devastated.
The power of art, of music, it has saved me many times.

Linda was working in Greenock and asked if I wanted dropped off on the way, The Greenock Cut walk is a regular for us and me solo where I explore the surrounding hills a bit more.
I was keen and switched off the laptop, got my gear together just in time to run out and into the motor before I got a hurry-up phone call.

She dropped me at Overtoun and off I went in an anti-clockwise direction, the views are best this way. I was here a week or so before and had a taken a short cut across the middle and it was only when I got home I realised that I’d been very close the crash site of an Avro Anson from July 1939, the very edge of WW2. A group of RAF planes were flying from Belfast to Glasgow and the one didn’t arrive had come to grief on Cauldron Hill above Greenock. The four occupants survived the crash and were rescued although the pilot later died from his injuries.
The plane was buried on site and one engine was brought down and now serves as a memorial at the visitor centre by Loch Thom. Another engine is some way downhill and lies in a burn. It was this I decided to look for.

It was hot but breezy, I kept my skin covered from the sun and was glad to be kept pretty cool as the air swished by my now ridiculously optimistic long hair. The views here never dull for me, the giant cruise ship at dock, the Clyde, the Luss Hills behind Helensburgh and there’s the Cobbler, how could you ever miss that shape.
Further on, the hills behind Dunoon ease into view, I had some fun exploring those a few weeks back, and then the dark finger of the Mull of Kintyre before I take a sharp left over one of the many stone bridges which cross the Cut and into the hinterland where I have never seen another soul walking. I’m not local, so maybe I’m missing something, haunted, angry badgers etc?

(I really thought that was a dead weasel or something.)

It’s a lovely wee trail this, twisting through a heather lined glen and now I out of the wind too: the heat built fast. The colourful wildlife of frogs, red and yellow dragonflies and whatever the hell that was I saw in the water was soon replaced by standard issue sheep. Mostly too tired to be arsed with my arrival, so we made eye contact a few times and went our separate ways.
You gain a good bit of extra height going this way and the views open up, but today I was heading off into what I might call a coire elsewhere, but lets call it a heathery depression. The track took me in there fast and then I was stumbling down the burn, trying keep my eyes in the water and my feet out of it. Less that 50 metres downstream I found it.

Old, battered but completely recognisable and with some very shiny unrusted steel components visible. it’s very big and I’d imagine very heavy, but I’m still surprised it’s here. Genuinely nice to see, and poignant too. The crew of that aircraft couldn’t have know what was coming, both on that flight and to the world a couple of months later.

I was too close to Cauldron Hill to not visit it so I gingerly hopped a barbed wire fence and headed off through knee deep heather. A sailor on a purple sea, imagine my glee.
I sat by a cairn I’ve never sat by before and saw a familiar view from a different viewpoint as I ate my hastily thrown together pieces (cheese, tomato, leaves, chili mayo) and a cuppa.
The wind shimmered the dry grass across the little top and tugged at my Tilley. I sat and just looked around me. I’ll take these moments of contentment when I can.

It’s gravel trail all the way back, new views east and south and surrounded by heather the whole way. Nearer Overton there were people again, all smiling and happy to be greeted. I I was smiling too, inside and out.
I walked through the car park and met Linda as she cut in from the main road. Now there’s timing.

“How’d you get on honey?”
It was magic, really good wee trip.
“Yay, I’m starvin…”
Home and dinner.

I took photies too, very glad of that. Might take the camera next time. Well, after the job in East Lothian is done. No hills for a couple of weeks, working under an old church and sleeping in the haunted rectory? That probably deserves a wee story on here too.