Isle of Arran

One of the many places Haylee and I had on our wishlist to visit when we came to Scotland was Arran. So on the weekend of the 16^th of March we made the trip down past Glasgow to visit ‘Scotland in Miniature’. We arrived on Friday afternoon and put our stuff away at the b&b we were staying at, and headed out to check out the town of Brodick & the Brodick Castle (which was getting renovated). After some fish & chips for dinner we had quite an early night ready for an early start in the morning.

Nice spot for fish & chips - was a bit cold though!

We caught the 8am bus and went up to Lochranza (on the very tip of Arran). The northern part of the Island is very rugged and made up mainly of mountains. Lochranza didn’t have much more than a castle so we walked around the island a bit before catching a bus to Blackwaterfoot on the western side. From here we walked quite a way around to see the Kings Caves, which had drawings inside from over 2000 years ago. We carried on along the track and down the road to go and see the impressive Machrie Moor stone circles (dating back to 1800BC). Some of the rocks were about 8m tall, I don’t know how they managed to get them up there back in the bronze age! After we got back on the road we decided to hitch a ride back to Lochranza as the bus was still another 2 hours away and it was freezing.. We watched a rugby game over a pint at the local pub, then saw an awesome sunset before bussing back to Brodick.

Got to be up there with one of the best sunsets I have seen

On Sunday we planned to visit the Glenashee waterfalls in the morning before we caught our ferry back to the mainland. We hitched again from Brodick to Whiting Bay with a nice local who gave Haylee some hand cream from Arran Aromatics as a souvenir. This saved us quite a bit of time so we took our time walking up to the waterfalls (which were alright without being spectacular). We got back to Whiting Bay and caught the earlier bus back to Brodick – giving us time for a hot drink before getting on the ferry.

Giants Graveyard - some of the many stone circle remains on Arran

 We managed to spend a bit of time in Glasgow in the afternoon before getting our bus back to Aberdeen. It was very busy on the streets due to St Patricks Day, was cool watching all the street performers and checking out a few shops while we had the chance. We definitely chose the right weekend to go as Arran had a really bad snow storm the week after and had no power for a week – we were quite lucky! The trip was definitely worth it, and although it would have been better visiting in summer, Arran lived up to expectations.