Day 5: Isle of Mull

The weather forecast had said it was going to be cloudy with a light breeze today. It certainly looked cloudy when we woke up but it wasn't raining, so after breakfast we set off in the car across Mull to the small village of Calgary where we were planning to do a walk. We parked in a small parking area next to a teashop and art gallery, which is the starting point for a woodland sculpture trail.

A series of paths leads through the woodland, taking you past a number of sculptures and artworks.

Some of them were better than others  This one was a fairy house in a hollow tree...

...this one was a mosaic, possibly representing the local beach...

...and this one was called the Leaf Seat.

We passed through a willow tunnel, which was quite fun...

...and then around the corner we found what was definitely my favourite sculpture  

We haven't seen any real deer, although there are supposed to be a lot of them on Mull, but this was definitely a cool substitute

We walked through a second willow tunnel...

...then exited the woodland, walking towards the main road.

The main reason for coming here was actually to see the local beach.

The beach at Calgary is supposed to be the largest and most attractive on the Isle of Mull.

Our first impressions were that we have probably seen better beaches in the Hebrides!

Luskentyre Beach on the Harris was bigger and West Beach on Berneray was more isolated. On our last holiday we'd also seen some pretty impressive beaches at Kiloran Bay on Colonsay and Machir Beach on Islay.  Compared to these, the beach at Calgary didn't wow us. But we may now just have impossibly high standards for beaches  

In fairness, I think Calgary wasn't helped much by the weather. Despite the forecast saying that it was going to be cloudy but dry today, it had started raining pretty much as soon as we got out of the car at the start of the woodland trail.

That meant that everywhere looked rather damp. I can imagine it would look different on a sunnier day

We followed a track around the edge of the beach.

The sandy area is really quite small; the rest of the coastline is rocky.

We made it as far as this little pier, before we turned around to retrace our steps.

It was pretty walking back towards the sand

We walked back into the woodland and followed a higher path this time, which gave us views back out across the bay.

Then we just had a rather long set of wooden steps to negotiate before we made it back to the car.

From there we drove along the coast of the island for a while. It was supposed to be a really scenic drive, but it was raining quite torrentially for a while and we couldn't see very much! We did, however, get a glimpse of a waterfall from the road and pulled over into a small car park to take a look.

This is Eas Fors waterfall.

We only had to walk a few steps to get a great view of it

Then it was back in the car, heading towards our final destination of the day: Loch Ba.

This was supposed to be an excellent place to walk and see the mountains of Mull without actually having to climb any of them.

Unfortunately, although the rain had eased off a bit it was still rather misty, so we weren't going to get all the views today!

It was still a really pretty place to walk though.

There was an easy flat path to follow around the edge of the lake.

We could have continued for quite a long way but the weather was starting to get worse again, so we turned around once we got to these trees.

Then it was time to retrace our steps back to the car and get back to the cottage to dry out  

Tomorrow is forecast to be cloudy with a light breeze too, so it remains to be seen how much it's going to rain