Scotland Day 8: Glencoe

 Glencoe is billed as one of the most beautiful landscapes in Scotland. It has superb hiking, biking, and winter activities. I still was not feeling super hot and the weather was supposed to move in this afternoon so we chose to do two short hikes after a wonderful full breakfast buffet where I tried black pudding.

Black pudding, a type of blood sausage, is the dark blob on the left of the little plate above my bowl of oatmeal (with prunes).  

The first hike was out of the village of Kinlochlevan to the Grey Mare's Tail waterfall.

For a closer view, you can scale along the walls using cables and rebar steps and over a pipe affixed to rocks across the stream. That was pretty fun.

The clouds wouldn't let up so this is the best view we got all day. Still, a nice walk. 

As an added bonus on the hike, we watched a moto cross adventure competition. The motorcycles go up the streambed and are scored on their skill. I couldn't help thinking the Sierra Club and the US Forestry Service would have a heart attack if this was done in Utah's precious few streams. 

After our hike we popped into the Glencoe Folk Life museum where we learned about slate mining, fishing, shinty (a game like field hockey popular in Scotland), and the Glencoe Massacre of 1692. I learned that even though Captain Robert Campbell gave the order to massacre the MacDonalds as they slept, he was only carrying out orders from the nasty British government, who wanted to punish the powerful MacDonalds. 

For our second small hike, we walked around the remnants of the Ballachulish slate quarry. The slate that was mined from this area covered roofs all over Scotland for 150 years. 

Inclined plane used to move slate in ore cars from the quarry to the lake/sea. 

A wall of the quarry that includes a basalt dike running from top left to bottom right. 

By this time, the weather was bad so we tucked into the Ballachulish Hotel for an afternoon of coziness.

Followed by dinner of comfort food while wrapped in my new wool sweater.