Good parts, bad parts

There are good parts and bad parts to every day.

The bad part was the landslip near Strachur this evening. When I got to St Catherines around 5.15 on my way home the road was flooded and there was lots of water and grush sweeping down from the hill tracks as I continued carefully along the A815 . Then I came upon a queue of traffic and soon people were being turned back with the news that the landslip was unlikely to be cleared that evening (though we did discover later that the Council managed to open one lane around 8.00pm).

The diversions were either via Tarbert (where there was only one ferry still to run and where I had been just a few hours before) or down to Gourock via the Eriskine Bridge. That was what I had to use and I got home three hours late having driven an extra 80 miles.

The good part was my first meeting of the day at the site of Tarbert Castle ( a stronghold of Robert the Bruce) where the community has done a fantastic job over the past few years in ensuring that the ruin did not just disappear and the surroundings become rush strewn wild land.

Some years ago I blipped Robert McPhail who has led the process and yesterday he showed me the outcome of the excavations that have recently taken place . They have produced some remarkable new finds including where the original 14th century (or perhaps earlier) gate would have been, and the stones that indicate a portcullis stood within it.

Robert ‘s new drawing of the castle , with the gate in place, is my extra photo.

Now the work begins to find a way to interpret this on site so that visitors - some 25,000 a year - can appreciate it and understand the place a bit better.