Blogging at 21:30 on Friday 27th December from intended overnighting spot N 55.83156°, W 06.08627° / http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:55.83156%2C-06.08627
We were awoken approaching midnight last night by a right old commotion. It was absolutely nothing to do with us, but instead one of the (presumably) unfortunate residents of / visitors to Jura.
The tiny ferry had been scrambled from Islay and had transported an ambulance over, which then went whizzing off into the dark, only to return about an hour later to be transported via the tiny ferry back to Islay. There was clearly a bit of tension and haste (and a lot of noise) involved, and the whole thing really brought home some of the complications of living in such isolated communities.
Jura itself is pretty rugged and remote with a very small population. There's only one fully public road that runs the length of the island and, invariably, we found all tracks leading off it marked private and mostly gated.
The main road starts out tiny but the further north you go the tinier it becomes. By the time we'd driven about 20 miles it was literally no wider than the truck's track and - what is more - regularly featured a combination of really scary drop-offs and truck-swallowing drainage ditches. In places it was a genuinely sketchy drive and even the 'easy' bits required full concentration. It was - at times - quite stressful.
At the point the road's designation changed from (a ridiculously over-reaching) 'A', to a highly questionable 'B', we decided enough was enough and so parked up and did something far easier in the form of a mizzle-drenched run up and down gradients of around 15%.
Lunch was well-and-truly earned, today.
Jura is very pretty and absolutely festooned with red deer. Parking places are very limited and this would seem to be an excellent strategy for passively-aggressively discouraging too many visiting conventional motorcaravans. As well as the outrageous price of the tiny Ferry.
A bit of casual daytime inter-tidal nature watching met with good numbers of birds, but nothing unusual. A black-throated diver just off shore was the only 'new' species of the trip so far.
From the intended overnighting spot (pic) - and again courtesy of the thermal-imaging camera - we've done rather better post-dusk and had some excellent views of red deer that came down from the hills in darkness to graze on seaweed. The big news though, was picking up a couple of otters that very purposefully did the opposite to the deer and bounded up the hillside from the beach: undoubtedly intent on unleashing some otter-based havoc somewhere.
The camera really has opened up a whole new world.
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