Hidden Loch Striven

A strong childhood memory of Loch Striven. My grandma's house was in Innellan, on the sunny, familiar Firth of Clyde at Dunoon, bustling with water-borne traffic and the Lowlands just across the strait. But one day we drove the short distance round Toward Point into a completely different world. Loch Striven is narrow sea loch, its steep forested slopes tumbling to the water with barely space for the single track road. There's no houses, nothing in particular to see, and no apparent point to the road, which peters out in a few miles leaving the rest of the loch roadless. We got out of the car and walked along an estate track, a quiet, rainy, lost world, a Scottish Jurassic Park. And there were giants here! 

For what was that in the water - two massive tankers, hidden out of sight round the corner. The sight of these huge vessels stayed with me. The next time I saw Loch Striven I was in a seaplane, and what was that secreted away? A decomissioned aircraft carrier! "Shall we land on deck?" joked the pilot.

HMS Invincible hides round Ardyne Point:

Loch Striven is a proper Highland fastness, yet just round the corner from Glasgow's Clyde, which has made it a convenient long-term deep water anchorage for all kinds of vessels, and a test water for wartime innovations - such as the attack on the Tirpitz, then anchored in a Norwegian fjord. It's one of the secrets of the west coast, a finger of water probing deep into the folded hills of Cowal.

That's where my experience of Loch Striven lay, until one fine April morning I came to the estate at the head of the loch to act as a body for search and rescue dogs. 

Found him!

It was a glorious day, the estate keeper pointing out an eagle soaring along the skyline above. I admired primroses and got covered in ticks, read my book, and generally basked in the sunshine. This was a different day to my first time by these waters! As we packed up to leave, a strange looking cloud caused comment. What was it? It turned out to be no cloud, but a rare parhelic circle. I'd never seen one before. It looked like the sun's smile.

The sun, smiling:

A breezy chop on the Firth of Clyde as the car ferry returned us to Inverclyde and its traffic, back in the bustle of things and away from Loch Striven.

If you had to ask me what the least interesting place in Scotland was, I might have been tempted to say Loch Striven. But scratch the surface and that's just not true.