Europe Trip Part Five: Scotland Part 3

(Michael)  We made sure to give ourselves some extra time to get to the ferry this time.  Missing the Colonsay ferry the previous day had already made our plans quite a bit more complicated, so we didn't want to take any chances this time.

Our whole day for Colonsay was cut down to about 12 hours...and those just happened to be from 7pm to 7am.  I was determined to visit the homeland, so we decided to really make the most of all the time we had.

After a couple hour ferry ride, we arrived.

First step onto the homeland

It didn't take us long to see that we were in the right place.  The memorial right off the port has someone with the family name (we should have zoomed in more, but notice the Angus McPhee by the gate bar).

Our first order of business was to quickly drop off our packs at the Colonsay Hotel.  The hotel doesn't usually do check-ins on Mondays, but we emailed them and explained our tragic situation and they took pity on us (I also bet that it didn't hurt to be a McPhie).  It took us a while wandering around the almost completely deserted hotel before we found someone to take us to our room.  We loved the place though, so cozy and quaint.

Once we got a room, we were out and ready to quickly explore the island.  First, we knew we needed to bag a few MacPhies, which means hike up any hill over 300 feet high.  So we made a break for one of the closest hills that had this neat monument "Erected by the people of Colonsay".

There were no roads nor paths, so we got to meet some of the locals....

Then we decided to bag another MacPhie on the other side.

At this point it was starting to get dark, and we were thinking about simply going back to the hotel and maybe wandering around the town for a little bit.  But then we saw it.  On the simple map I picked up from the hotel lobby was a point marked "MacFie Monument".  It looked like it was about a couple miles away, and we knew we'd be racing against time if we wanted to get there before dark, as it was already 9:30, but we just had to see it.

We scrambled down the hill and started to jog along one of two paved roads on the island.  We stopped to document this little monument built by the clan.

As we were half running half walking, we came across a jogger coming the other way.  We asked him if he knew how far away we were from the MacFie Monument, but he had no clue.  I will summarize the rest of the adventures by going through each challenge.

1. The map - I wish we had kept it so I could document how little we had as far as directions.  All we knew was that there were two roads and that there was some kind of path by a lake that would take us there.  It would have also been helpful to know what kind of monument we were trying to find (pile of rocks, plaque, pillar).  It turned out that we managed to pick the wrong road, and only realized we were off when we got to the coast.  Turns out we went all the way across the width of the island.  Since we knew we were even more short on time, we decided the only way to make it to the monument now was to try to find a shortcut.

2. The bog - Ok, maybe it wasn't a bog per say, but it was definitely swampy as we tried to cut across to the other road.  We found out the trick was to move fast before your shoes got a chance to sink into the ground.  It was pretty rough going, and we were so glad when we finally hopped over a stone wall to find asphalt again.

3. The highland cow - I feel like Amanda and I are pretty brave when it comes to animals.  We don't mind the large dogs or the rams etc., but when we came across this...

I admit that we paused a moment.  A bunch of horrible scenarios ran through my mind as this seemed to be a classic beginning to a travel horror story.  So all of us stood there for a while, and we decided that we couldn't let these creatures stop us.  We carefully, and I mean carefully, walked up around a nearby ridge to leave our "friends" in peace.

4. The backwards sign - After we got to the end of the second road we knew we were lost once again.  We tried roaming some of the hills to see if we could find anything.  At one point I got excited because I mistook a telephone pole for the monument.  It was almost completely dark, so we decided to wrap things up and head back.  After a little while we came across a fork in the road and saw the sign pointing to the monument.  Sure enough, we had missed this coming down because the sign had been facing the opposite way.  With new excitement we hurried along this new path (which seemed to last forever), avoided some more cows, and saw a formation of rocks that turned out to be the monument.

5. The dead camera battery - That really speaks for itself.  So we don't have a record of us making it there except for a very blurry picture I took with my cell phone.  Here is what it looks like in the daylight....

This is what's written on the plaque, 

"IN 1623 MALCOLM, LAST CHIEF OF OUR CLAN WAS MURDERED AT THIS STONE BY A RENEGADE MACDONALD. DAMAGED OVER THE CENTURIES IT WAS REPAIRED BY ULF MACFIE HAGMAN, SWEDEN, CHARLES MACPHEE, AUSTRALIA AND DUNCAN MACPHEE, SCOTLAND. THE PLOT OF GROUND WAS GIVEN TO THE CLAN MACFIE BY LORD STRATHCONA AND FENCED BY GIFTS FROM CLAN FOLK. ON 10TH MAY 1977 ULF HAGMAN AND DR. EARLE MACPHEE, CANADA, A CLAN HISTORIAN, DEDICATED THE MEMORIAL TO OUR CLAN."

Pretty cool/ominous right?  It was sort of creepy reading that with a flashlight with just the two of us in the dead of night.  A perfect beginning to some scary story.  But we were able to make it safely back to our hotel in one piece.  We were completely exhausted from having run around much of the island, but satisfied that we had made some good use of our limited time.

The next morning we woke up to a wonderful breakfast.  We really had to hand it to the hotel, it was one of the nicest breakfast we had on our entire trip, and we liked all the little decorations.

And after that, we had to board the ferry back to Oban.  Of course we wished that we could have stayed longer, but it was a good adventure nonetheless.