Kayaker on Loch Etive seen from Connel Bridge

It has been sometime since I last posted here, but instead of starting with a current post I thought I would begin back with our visit to Loch Etive in Argyll. I accompanied Woodpeckers to her mother Kirsty’s funeral where we stayed in a B’n’B with her sister, TMLHereandThere, only a few hundred yards from Connel Bridge, where I took this picture showing a kayaker dicing with the Falls of Lora. I had tried to use a panorama of the scene but Blip seems to dislike such a wide image.

I won’t say too much about that very emotional time for them and their two sisters and two brothers as there Blip journals describe the occasion so well. But I will add a few of the pictures I took starting with this one.

While Helena and Tanya were busy with family I went for a walk up to Connel Bridge, which once upon a time also carried the local branch railway line from Oban north to Ballachulish following the coastline of Loch Linnhe towards Fort William. The bridge was a major achievement allowing the road and railway to traverse the mouth of Loch Etive, at the dramatic Falls of Lora, which are exposed as the tidal waters ebb out to sea. At high tide large sea going vessels can enter Loch Etive over these Falls and head inland towards Taynuilt and the quarry of Bonawe.

The family lived for many years on the north shore of Loch Etive about three miles inland from the bridge at Achnaba, where Kirsty would be buried a few days later. While I wagon the bridge I watched as about a dozen kayakers rode the waves down and over the Falls, and you can just see some of them in the water beneath the far side of the bridge.

Inland and in the far distance is the peak of Ben Cruachan close to where Loch Etive makes a sharp turn and head north for a similar distance towards Glencoe. It is a magnificent landscape which I’m so pleased to have discovered since first visiting the family in the 1990s. I particularly remembering going on a boat tour from near Taynuilt up Loch Etive one long summer’s day back before I started Blipping.

The links to Helena and Tanya’s blips which I've added above are to their Blips on roughly the same day, and both also show the Falls of Lora. If you visit their journals you can read much more about this memorable time and you’ll find it both better written and more informative. I hope to add some more images of those days in due course, including showing their wonderful house on the shore of Loch Etive.