20-Jul-2014 Ulva

The car park for the Ulva ferry was full---- of lounging highland cattle but there was a little space left for our Corsa. We built the tandem and went to the quay. The ferryman comes when he is summoned by the red square which has to be moved manually across a board. It was an unusually shaped small craft with room for bikes but he said that it wouldn’t be a suitable surface for us to cycle and “would be more relaxing to walk”. He was right and we were glad as it was hard enough to walk through the under or overgrowth. Bracken had obscured a lot of the paths and Bob seriously regretted wearing shorts because of the brambles.

After a mere minute in the boat we reached the shore and it cost £6 return each which we paid in the bake-house which oozed lovely bread baking smells. The 2 girls, daughters of the ferryman, ran the place admirably. The lunches had got larger daily and we had a massive bowl of tasty squash soup with homemade bread and a giant cheese roll. The cakes looked fit for a cookery book especially the bramble with huge blackberries on the top of pink icing.

 Next door, hundred yards north of the main slipway, is a small museum- Sheila’s thatched cottage which depicts how people lived on the island in 1900s.  An effigy of Sheila was quite alarming as you went in through the door. Sheila was noted for her method of stoking her fire. A long tree branch extended from her box bed to the grate and washing was draped over it. As the branch burnt she pushed it further in to the fire and the thatched cottage still stands!  Sheila worked as a dairy maid at Ulva House and also collected winkles for extra income. The cottage has 2 rooms one for the family and the other for animals. During the 19^th century there were 700 inhabitants but now there are less than 30. There are ruins of settlements all over Ulva. There are signposts near the ferry for a woodland and coastal walk, up to Livingstone’s cottage and others that takes you clockwise or anticlockwise lasting anything from 2 to 3 hours to 5 hours or more.  We didn’t know which to take and found them hard to follow. We started on the church circular then deviated onto a woodland and shoreline walk predicted to take three and a half hours. My sense of direction was quickly thrown and Bob bemoaned his lack of compass. Since coming home I have seen that a 5 hour walk takes you via a bridge onto Gometra but on reading the blog it becomes 11 miles, so too far if you go over for only part of the day. We thought there was a causeway only. People all walk at different rates and it would have been better to say how many miles and what sort of terrain, we feel. We did a lot of scrambling and diving into thick bracken with only a vague sense of the path. We made it back OK but we worried about a family with small children that we had passed half way round. At 3 we were back in the ferryboat – just us and the ferryman though there were still quite a lot of people eating at the boathouse cafe. They did a good trade in seafood, and oysters were their speciality. We suspect most people don’t go walking.