Oban, Glen Coe, and More

I left off this morning’s post about the full-day tour I took today by telling you that the tour’s late lunch stop was in the town of Oban. But I didn’t tell you anything about Oban or the subsequent afternoon stops. Those stops included a distant view of a small castle and some stops in Glen Coe (the Coe Valley).

This is my last day in Glasgow and probably my last post for this trip. So I’ll place brief Glasgow and trip summaries below.

The tour was advertised as being ten hours long. It ended up being a ten-and-a-half-hour tour. I mention that because it’s now getting late and I’m nearing total exhaustion. Consequently, I might rush through this entry because I’m eager to get to sleep, So I may place fewer details here than in most of my posts. Sorry about that. Unless you usually find yourself wishing I’d cut down on the details in my posts. In which case, you’re welcome.

I suppose I could just not write a post at all, but I don’t want to disappoint my reader.

Let’s get going so I can get to sleep, shall we?

Oban

“An t-Òban” is Gaelic for “little bay.” So it should come as no surprise that Oban is on a small bay. Some ferries to Scottish islands in the Atlantic leave from there.

According to the driver/guide of the bus tour I was on, Steve, Oban is known as the seafood capital of Scotland. So, of course, I had to find a seafood restaurant for lunch. I chose one recommended by Steve right by the water. Because it was already late for lunch and I was getting hangry, I made a beeline for it without any distractions along the way.

There, I had some wonderful scallops and a glass of wine and had a hard time deciding whether to linger over it and thoroughly enjoy the food and the views or to rush so I’d have time to explore Oban a bit before the scheduled departure time from the town. I chose a middle ground. Not rushed, but not languidly lingering and savouring every bite and every glimpse of the bay.

Reserving some time to wander around Oban was a good decision. Until this trip, the only thing I knew about Oban was that it had a Scotch Whisky distillery. I rarely drink scotch now, and I never was a heavy scotch drinker. (That is to say, I was heavy, but I didn’t drink scotch heavily.) The last time I had a scotch was about five years ago when I visited Edinburgh for the first time. I did a scotch tasting on that trip. Before that, I think it had probably been more than a decade prior since I’d had one.

But there was a time in my life when I had the occasional scotch. I seem to remember quite enjoying Oban scotch. I didn’t go into the Oban distillery today, but I walked past it and paid it silent homage.

Besides the distillery, the town is a treat. There is the bay, and that’s very attractive. But there are also a lot of shops and restaurants in low-rise buildings by the waterfront. There are more low-rise buildings containing residences (including inns and B&Bs), shops, restaurants and other businesses back from the bay. The farther back you get, the more they’re residences rather than business. It’s all very pretty and homey.

As I walked around Oban, I thought to myself that it would be a nice place to spend a couple of days. But, the tour marches on. Or, rather, drives on.

Castle Stalker

Castle Stalker has a dark history. It was built in the 15th century by a clan chief. The chief was a quiet sort, who, according to archival material, had a reputation as a kind and compassionate soul among the few neighbours who got to know him, as much as castles do tend to have neighbours, which is not much.

It was later learned that he was a vicious stalker who, in disguise, terrorized local women, sometimes committing horrible violence against them. As a result, when this was discovered, his castle became derogatorily nicknamed locally “Castle Stalker” as a condemnation of the clan chief. The name stuck and it is now the only name it’s known by.

No. That’s a total lie. I just made it up. It’s mostly a fabrication.

According to Steve, “stalker” is Gaelic for a man who hunts with hawks. So, Castle Stalker is the castle of a man who hunts with hawks.

But my story wasn’t a total fabrication. According to Wikipedia, the castle was indeed likely built in the 15th century by the Clan MacDougall.

We took a ten-minute stop to get out and take a look at the island-based Castle Stalker from a distance. From our vantage point, it looked like a small stub of a castle. But, like Kilchurn Castle this morning, the best part of the view wasn’t the castle, but its surroundings. They were breathtaking.

There was a better view of Castle Stalker when we drove on. From there, it looked like a somewhat more substantial structure, but the bus couldn’t stop on the road. I took a picture from that vantage point out of the window of the moving bus.

Glen Coe

We made three stops in Glen Coe (Coe Valley), one at the combined visitor centre, café, and restrooms in Glencoe, a settlement in Glen Coe, another at a vista point pull-off beside the road through the valley, and a third just at the side of the road where we hopped out of the bus and got a good, quick view of the sun behind the mountains.

The views from all three were awe-inspiring. The mountains and the green and golden valleys were too stunning for description by the likes of me. I’ll post a picture from one of the stops here, and because this section is short, I’ll continue them into the summary sections below.

But before I get into the summaries, a weather report. All day today, the weather was surprisingly exceptional for what has been my experience in Scotland on this trip. There were a few clouds, but it was mostly sunny. It wasn’t particularly cold in the morning and by afternoon it warmed up to just a little below room temperature. Perfect.

Glasgow Summary

This is not going to be a particularly helpful summary if you hope to use it to decide whether you should visit Glasgow. As I mentioned in my first post from Glasgow on this trip, I’d been to Glasgow about five years ago and I set out this time to try to avoid repeating too many of the sights and activities I saw and did then. I did repeat one sight, or two depending on how you count them, but that was it. If you want to read all of the posts I’ve ever written about Glasgow, you can find links to them by clicking here.

The sight(s) I repeated this time were the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and Kelvingrove Park. The art-gallery-and-museum building is located in the park, so you decide if you want to count that as one or two sights.

To fill up my three and a half days here this time, I did a couple of day trips, the one described above and in this morning’s post, and a cruise on Loch Lomond yesterday. Last time, I stayed solely in Glasgow when based here.

I quite enjoyed my time in Glasgow and the trips from it. If you’ve never been to Glasgow and you want to see everything I saw during my first trip and everything I saw this time, including the day trips, you should plan for five full days here. If you are the sort of person who likes to run from sight to sight to take everything in you might be able to do it in fewer days. But that’s how I was on my first trip, so some of that compressed tourism is already included in that five-day recommendation.

Scotland 2024 Trip Summary

As has become my custom over the previous few trips, I’ll wrap up this, the last of my posts from this journey with a trip summary. This is an odd one relative to my previous jaunts.

For one thing, because I’d been to Scotland before, there was a wee bit of repetition on this trip. But the biggest thing is that for the first almost a week, I was in Edinburgh visiting a relative who is living there and another relative who also made the journey there. As I said in my opening post on this trip, from Dundee, I write about my tourist time, not my family time. So you won’t find any Edinburgh posts from this year here. But you can go back and look at the Edinburgh posts from five years ago by clicking here.

That said, Edinburgh is a beautiful city that generally protects its heritage. And it has a lot of old heritage. It’s a great city even when my relative is not living there. If you have the opportunity, it’s well worth a visit or a few visits if you’ve never been. Her being in Edinburgh made it fantastic, but if you’re a random stranger who somehow found this journal, I don’t know that she’d want to entertain you.

I’ll be heading back to Edinburgh tomorrow and I’ll have half a day there, but it’s family time again, so no post. My journal. My rules.

My flight back to Toronto is scheduled to leave early the next morning. So, unless my flight is exceptionally delayed, you won’t find any more posts from this trip here.

If I had to rank the cities and towns I’ve been to on this trip in order of personal preference as a tourist attraction, Edinburgh would be number one. After that, it’d be Inverness, Stirling, Glasgow, Perth, and Dundee.

As to timing, I’ve already talked about Glasgow in this post, so I’ll say no more here. I think I would have enjoyed another day or two in Inverness and Stirling on top of the three nights I spent in Inverness and two in Stirling. Particularly Inverness. It’s beautiful and it has a few opportunities for day trips that I didn’t take.

My two nights in Perth were about the right duration for me.

Dundee is a tough one. I didn’t find it to be a bad place, but, on its own, I thought it was skippable as a tourist destination. However, it’s easy to get to it from Edinburgh with your luggage. (There’s a direct train.) And St. Andrews is a simple day trip without luggage from Dundee (an urban-style bus), but less so from Edinburgh. St. Andrews is beautiful, so Dundee makes for a good stop for that reason.

And that concludes this Scotland trip. See you next time.