Tour of Loch Katrine

Enough of Edinburgh. We had finally gotten our heads screwed on straight enough to navigate town, but still didn't feel like we knew where we were -- no context. What better for that than to hop a bus, and leave town for an afternoon. We wound up on a bus headed up to Lock Katrine, up in the Trossachs, the mountains to the northeast of Glasgow.

The trip out was pleasant. We were able to see lots of places by the roads we had read the names of, or seen pictures of, but had not yet figured out where they were. We passed by Stirling, home of Stirling Castle and the William Wallace Monument. Stirling Castle is even more impressive than Edinburgh Castle. There isn't a town built up around all sides, so it still looks formidible and imposing. It's also seems to cry out for much more attention than the surrounding terrain, which is mostly flat. Kristin found out later that it too used to be a swamp, only drained in relatively recent history. A swamp moat, I guess.

The bus kept on going. We passed the only lake in Scotland (all the others are called lochs), and finally got to the Trossachs. The road started twisting and winding, and kept going almost long enough to make us road sick. The bus kept going up and up and up, and at long last we reached Loch Katrine. Many times along the way, we could tell we were nearing an old house. Once upon a time, rhodendrons only lived in the gardens, but the climate here appears stellar for them, and you can see these enormous bushes of rhodendrons that have snuck out of their gardens and started heading down the roads. They're not slick enough to get very far, but they've definitely escaped their original homes. By watching for rhodendrons, you could tell when you were nearly at the next house.

The bus parked, and we were all carted right away into an old steamer boat for a cruise around the Loch. As the boat trudged through the water, we got to hear some stories and trivia about it. Loch Katrine is used as the water supply for Glasgow. (David Bulloch, the Performance Co-ordinator for West of Scotland Water, pointed me to their web page for Tourism at Loch Katrine.) There aren't any rivers in or out of the Loch, which they claim helps maintain the purity of the water. There's a road and a bike path along one edge of the lock, and high hillsides in any direction. The hills are either well forested, or completely tree-free with grazing sheep. You could tell these hills were once clear cut, since the switch from grassy hillside to forested ones were precise and abrupt. Some of the hills were far enough away it was hard to see the sheep, but if you really looked, the hills had literally thousands of sheep on them. I wouldn't be surprised if I saw more sheep that day than I had seem cumulatively growing up in California.

The boat cruised down a ways, and then turned around to return to the port. We did our best to not get buffeted by the strong winds too much, and just tried to slow down and enjoy the environment. It's hard to do, relaxing like that. I much prefer journeys that go from one place to another, not just around in a loop. Since we had not stopped anywhere along the way in the loch, it felt like we were just invading the waters, only to be sent away by the defending forces when we were discovered.

On the way back to Edinburgh, we stopped off at a touristy woolen mill, more of a "factory outlet" than anything else. You couldn't get raw materials here, only finished sweaters, blankets, kilts, and so on. Outside, you could find tufts of woll left on plants by passing sheep. I suppose if you were patient enough, you could collect enough to spin into something more useful.

On the way back into town, we passed an industrial section with a pile a pile of cooling towers. The bus driver said that they were part of an oil refinery. Having grown up with the cooling tower as a sign of industrial danger, we weren't sure how to react. The Scots seem proud enough of their industrial world that they make little effort to hide it. The biggest shock about this field, though, was to see the occasional pipes with a huge flame flying from the top. They were like a collection of beacons signalling out some industrial message to the world. (Some email from a local Scot describes my images as alarmist and believes that I misrepresent the "benign industrial process" that comes with having petroleum industry in your life. I have no argument with him, but my California eyes are unaccustomed to industrial sprawl so close by.)