Three times a week (but not on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday) a Calmac car ferry sails from Ardrossan, the main port for Arran, to Campbeltown, the remote town that sits at the bottom of the long north-south Kintyre peninsula. By boat it is a journey of 40 miles, around the bottom of Arran and beyond, which takes a bit under three hours. As ways of reaching Campbeltown go, it was an attractive option.
To drive there from pretty much anywhere is a long way. From Ardrossan, for example, it would be a drive of 153 miles and it would take three and a half hours, according to Google Maps. That, less 30 minutes, is what faced the man I met on the ferry coming back from Islay a couple of weeks ago. He lived in Ardrossan. You spend half the journey going north up Loch Fyne to come south again.
There are other ways you can get there: you can fly from Glasgow, at great expense to yourself and the environment; or you can travel via Gourock, ferry to Dunoon and another ferry across Loch Fyne to Tarbert, which is no faster, but possibly more fun. The shortest way in miles is to island hop across Arran via two ferries and a serious hill climb. But even then you have 30 miles of the long Kintyre peninsula to drive (one more hour) or cycle and since I am coming back that way on map 69 anyway, I made sure I was on the Sunday ferry. Just to give you an idea of its geographical position, one of the easiest ways to reach Campbeltown, in normal non-Covid times, is on a passenger ferry that sails there in just 90 minutes from Northern Ireland! But that is an adventure for another day..
I stayed about an hour’s cycle ride from Ardrossan, down the coast in the pleasant town of Troon. Here is Royal Troon, a golf course where the Open championship is sometimes held. There are also miles of beach, with a fabulous view across to the mountains of Arran. The tide goes out a very long way. It is popular, I’m told, with kite surfers. It was certainly popular with weekend beach goers yesterday in the warm summer weather.
My accommodation was just back from the sea front in an airbnb. After breakfast, with a little time on my hands, I allowed my host to tell me his life story. I shouldn’t have. I really could have been there all morning and I was on the wrong side of the breakfast table to slip away. I eventually excused myself before it got to be a problem, but had already heard about an international life of financial boom and bust, personal opulence, homelessness, sequestration and family crisis. It was a living soap opera, and at almost seventy, he was still going back for more speculation in a multi million pound housing consortium. He thought. If his Canadian backer ever recovered from a serious illness. In the meantime he was bridging the gap doing airbnb in a house he was renting. I haven’t led the most boring of lives or done the dullest of jobs by a long way; but after a couple of hours of this, I was exhausted. I was glad to return to the simple act of cycling in the sun.
The ferry trip was a lovely cruise along the length of Arran, warm enough to be out on deck all the way. There is a real sense of arrival when you reach Campbeltown in its protected natural bay. It is large and old enough to feel important and has a proper waterfront with bright flower beds, and even a small cinema, with a very attractive surrounding backdrop of hills. There was a lot of timber on the harbour being loaded onto a big ship. It was quite exciting.
And then it started to rain, which rather restricted my plans for the evening. I was going to cycle to the very end of the peninsula, but that would now have to wait for tomorrow morning. I also have a short tour booked at one of Campbeltown’s distilleries, since it counts as a distinct whisky region in its own right. So it could be another busy day of drinking, eating, cycling and another ferry. I have even drawn up a schedule. Early start required!
