Sat 4In the absence of hammer blasts of wind on the tent, I slept soundly and peacefully. Until bladder pressure woke me, and the awful realisation dawned. Oh Bill, you've let yourself down. Stupid, fundamental, elementary cabbage-looking error: no empty milk bottle, or anything similar. I was going to have to get out of the tent...
I made sure I was covered as much as I could, including head net, but the ferocious little bastards were waiting for me, and they knew there was only one reason I'd be leaving the security of the tent at that time of morning. It was horrific, it was carnage. I dread to think how much blood I lost. Not only that, but getting back into the tent again meant bringing, unavoidably, hundreds of the buggers with me on my clothes (mostly...).
The only effective way I found, and still highly inefficient at that, to decrease their number inside the tent was to lure them into one corner of the inner tent with my head torch and squash them against it with a tissue. This got maybe a few per cent of them each time, so I asymptotically cleared the tent of 'em, the bloody streaks on the tent gradually becoming longer over the 20 minutes or so it took. Had to be done, otherwise I had visions of my skeleton being found in the morning, stripped to the bone by the voracious bloody things. And anyway, I used a different corner to last time I had to do the same thing, so I have distinct reminders of different memorable trips to Scotland.
That done, I returned to my lovely sound sleep, until 0730 when my newly-assigned cuckoo turned up and proceeded to make up for any lost time. Well, it was time to get up anyway, as I was planning on joining the 10 am tour of the castle - there's only one a day, timed so that ferry passengers can make it, so I thought this one might be quiet, what with it being the early ferry an'all. So breakfast, a luxurious power shower over at the hostel, and a wander up to the castle to join about half a dozen others and a stand-in guide (the usual guides working all hours on an inventory, apparently). This was no loss: I'm sure we got more informal gossip from the stand-in about the goings-on of the aristocracy, the royal connections, infamously short kilts and butch ghillies...
Kinloch Castle IQuick (and possibly biased) historical summary: George Bullough, an Edwardian playboy, built Kinloch Castle. Rum was, in its entirety, his plaything, he having inherited it along with the rest of his Victorian father George's fortune (made, in Accrington, from the automation of spinning looms). George didn't like the colour of Rum sandstone, so had it imported from Annan instead; he had glasshouses built to keep alligators, so that he could eat alligator meat when he visited Rum for six weeks of the year. Had tracks built so he could race his Bentley over the island. On top of the everyday huntin' fishin' shootin'. You get the picture. The island and, hence, the castle are owned by Scottish Natural Heritage. SNH hate it, vehemently: it's a money pit, costing millions to maintain, and it's Grade A listed so they have to - but it has no merit whatsoever other than its social significance, which really isn't what SNH do.
a monument to… colossal wealth and ego and acquisitive greed… It is a building without a redeeming feature.. a loathsome edifice. It perpetuates only the memory of the worst kind of island lairds… a hideous affront, but nothing that a good fire and subsequent demolition couldn’t rectify
That said, photographically it's an absolute bloomin' paradise...
Main hall gallery, Kinloch Castle Dining room Stags foot candlestick holders Delightful, no?
Billiards room In places, you can't move for dead animals stuffed and mounted,
Divers stuffed animals, Kinloch Castle The Orchestrion, a whole-orchestra equivalent of a player piano, is reputedly one of only two working ones in the world, and was built for Queen Victoria. It lives in a "cupboard under the stairs" the size of my house,
The orchestrion I The orchestrion III could happily have spent all day in there. As it was, our 45 minute tour ran, happily, to more like 90. More than one of my co-tourists had indeed spent days there in the past. A Swiss woman had stayed there, when the castle itself used to be the hostel. Honestly, it really did. She said they used to eat at that dining table, wander freely around the place - one reason an inventory is now needed... And another bloke said his last visit had been 40-odd years earlier - as a ghillie, in rather different times. A really interesting bunch.