I spent a week in Tobermory on the Isle of Mull in August, here I shall ramble about that. Yes, it’s rather late, I got quite a lot of planned posts which all piled up, and then in November I was doing NaNoWriMo and didn’t post anything other than already finished poetry.
So there’s my excuses. On with the post.
It was a good week, Mull is a lovely place. There was a lot of rain while we were there, but that wasn’t exactly surprising. I think if I went somewhere known for being hot and calm in the summer and it was pouring it down the whole time I’d be annoyed, but Scotland is not such a place.
We had a very early start on the way, as we were doing it all in one trip. We drove up to Oban and got the ferry across to Craignure, and I think we were in Tobermory by early afternoon.
Tobermory is the capital of Mull. It’s a very pretty town, very memorable, with all the brightly coloured buildings on the main street. There’s a lot more to it than that one street, obviously, but I admit I didn’t really explore it much. Our cottage was a bit out of town, so I couldn’t just go for wanders around whenever I felt like it. But the main street was very nice to walk along, on the nicer days.
We did go for a walk in the surrounding area one day, through the woods. It was a very clear path, but there was the odd fork and we didn’t know where we going, so it was a bit of a mystery walk. After about an hour’s wandering we ended up at Aros Park, and specifically an old pier that’s there. Aros Park seems to be where you’re meant to aim for, so we made it, though I suspect we took the long way round. But that meant we saw more of the woods, so fine.
One day we visited the Isle of Iona, primarily to see Iona Abbey. I had never seen an intact abbey before so I was pretty excited about going there. It’s still in use, and I did feel a bit weird visiting an active place of worship as a tourist attraction, but it is open as one. Some bits were closed off to visitor, that’s to be expected. There was plenty to see though. I like looking at the walls, the architecture of the rooms, and the old bricks.
I don’t really know anything about architectural styles and stuff but I do like looking at old buildings. I just can’t really elaborate very well on what it is I like. But I did like the building.
There’s the ruins of the old nunnery to see too. Those are more like the kind of ruins I’m used to seeing. There’s a pretty big chunk of the structure left, so that was cool to wander around.
Iona was a nice place to walk round in general. We stayed in the town, didn’t stray much further out than the abbey. It was a very nice place though, from what I saw.
I’m not brilliant at description, I confess.
You get the ferry to Iona from Fionnphort, and I really liked Fionnphort. It was probably my favourite place from the holiday, even if we were only there on our way to somewhere else. The beach there was just so pretty – granted, it was a nice day, so that probably weighted my opinion in favour of it, but I think it is an extra beautiful place anyway. I took a disproportionate amount of pictures for the time we were actually there.
On another day we visited Duart Castle. There’s apparently four castles on the Isle of Mull, but this appears to be the only one open to the public. It’s an odd castle to look at because it was destroyed, then abandoned by the mid-eighteenth century, and restored in 1911. So the roof is more of a mansion roof than a castle one. And the rooms on the inside were decorated for a totally different time period to what they were built for.
This is going to seem a bit weird, but one of my favourite rooms was the old bathroom – as in, not an in-use one. It was only a little room, but it was just the clash between the big castle walls and the early-twentieth century toilet and sink. It wasn’t the only room that was evident in. Where there was an original window it was always quite clear too. It felt weird to see because both the building and the furnishings were historical to me, but the people who restored it in 1911 would have seen castles the same as I do; these big, cool old fortresses. If I’d been them I’d have wanted to restore and live in it too. Anyway, I just liked seeing the contrast between the interior decoration and the actual structure (most of the structure).
We had some drives about and saw some other random things. I need to mention the boats at Salen because I loved those. Salen is a village that we did not visit, but we did stop there on the way back from somewhere else because of these two abandoned fishing boats in the bay. We drove past them a few times before stopping and they caught my eye every time, so I was glad to get a closer look at them. Looking it up, it seems many other people feel the same because there’s tons of pictures of them online. They are just very striking.
And that’s not every detail written down, I left this post a bit too late to get finished, truth be told. I might have been a bit more rambly if I’d put it up sooner. I’m making myself a proper schedule for blogging next year to stop this happening so much. But that’s the highlights. Now I aim to get the photos up by the end of the year.
staircaseinthedark 