tim&chhay

On another quiet weekend thsi month we spent a pleasant Sunday investigating Ian Hamilton-Findlay’s Little Sparta garden. On a par with Charles Jencks Garden of Cosmic Speculation in terms of influence in the landscape art world it is on a much smaller more intimate scale and while it has intriging moments I found it less compelling.

On our way home we stopped in to our friends parent’s house in Leadhills (the 2nd highest village in Scotland) and had a fantastic foursies in their garden - which it turned out had almost as much to offer than Little Sparta.

A quiet Sunday afternnon drive on a rare sunny day took us into Ayrshire for a quick spin. We were heading for the Graffiti Project but baulked at the steep entrance charge (we’ll go back in winter when its free!) We then stopped at Fairlie (former home of Fyfe yachts) which has an interesting juxtaposition of beautiful bay and enormous wharf (above), and then down the coast through the tired but interesting Victorian seaside town of Largs, the 1960’s New Town experiment Irvine and the oh so posh Troon.

We are in the middle of a busy 6 weeks, and currently are broadbandless at home (not such a bad thing for a household that spends 8 hours a day in front of a screen anyway) so I’ve been a bit lax with the updating.

Reaching back into the end of June our friend Howe visited for a weekend from Copenhagen (via Saigon via Adelaide via Malaysia), unfortunately he lucked out with the weather so we ducked showers all weekend but still managed to catch a fair bit of stuff.

After a late night repast at favourite haunt Pintxos on the Friday night after he arrived we did our usual customised walking tour on the Saturday - including taking in the excellent Haptic exhibition at the Lighthouse, and dinner at Malaysian Chinese gem Rumours.

Sunday we made yet another attempt at getting to Pitlochry to visit Scotland’s smallest distillery, however a late start and some poor weather saw us turn back at Loch Tay. An overly long diversion took us to the Falkirk Wheel (above)for the first time - faintly disappointing in a typical Millenium Lottery Funding sort of way.

Late in June Chhay & I spent a night camping with the mountain goats in the highlands at Kinlochleven near Ben Nevis. We managed three munroes in a fairly arduous 18 k walk up in the Mamores - some spectacular views towards Glencoe and Ben Nevis although the steepness of some of the decents (above) were a bit much for Chhay’s sense of vertigo. For a more details report see Niall Iain’s thoughts at the goat pen.

I enjoyed my first office outing with my new employers last weekend (not bad after 5 weeks given that we didn’t go anywhere in 18 months at my previous office!) to our newly completed visitors centre at Culloden. Not knowing anything about the battle it was interesting from a historical as well as architectural perspective (I later learned that the Henderson’s sneakily avoided it so I don’t have to take sides in all the stupid commentary 250 years later - scroll down for the comments!)

The building itself sits well in the context and make some nice strong big moves, however up close reveals the evidence of the design + build contract in some of the detailing and final resolution. However, standing in the battlefield with the timber cladding just visible on the horizon (above) the mystery and spookiness of the site is retained, with the profile of the building following the surrounding hills.

I’m looking forward to out next trip in a few months - a little further afield this time to Venice for the opening of the Scottish gathering space.

For the second part of our Italian adventure we headed to a small island off the coast of Naples to pick up a charter yacht for a weeks sailing. Our aim was to sail to the Amalfi coast and explore the islands in the bay of Naples - Ischia, Capri and our base Procida.
Procida (below) itself is small un-touristy fishing and yachting enclave full of fantastic old buildings packed on to hillsides and a crazy system of narrow windy streets. It was a small mission to get there - including a thorough telling off from the Naples ticket inspectors for boarding a tram without a ticket, but delightful once we arrived.

Once we had settled on board Zippella (below) we headed out of the picturesque Marina di Chiaiolella to headed for neighbouring Ischia for the evening. A brisk breeze soon had a heeling nicely enjoying the sunshine and breeze on our faces as we made for the port of Sant’Angelo, however a couple of hours in, as the wind picked up and we beat towards port our rather tired looking mainsail tore, reminding Dugs and I of the somewhat haphazard nature of sailing!

After several failed attempts at mooring (our anchoring technique took some time to rediscover) we puttered in to the village and had a fantastic seafood feast served by a crazy lady at a little restaurant situated on an isthmus looking back at the town.

We toddled back to the boat as the wind started to pick up, and headed to bed only to be woken around 2 o’clock in the morning by rain streaming in through the portholes, and our dinghy about to launch it self from the deck. A quick visual check through the gloom backed up by the GPS had our anchor dragging so we nosed in a little closer and tried to sleep, it was probably lucky our somnolence wasn’t too deep because our anchoring still wasn’t up to scratch and at 5 in the morning we had dragged another 500 m and were heading towards the beach! We adjusted again and had a fitful rest till morning proper.

With our broken sail we had to readjust our plans to try and get it repaired so dawdled back to our home port with a delightful stop for lunch and a swim in the harbour at Ischia Porto (below) just across from Procida.

Once we were back in our base marina we had some bad news - it turned out our mainsail would take longer than expected to be repaired. We had time to explore the town around the marina and get a decent nights sleep before Claire headed off to make it back to work(!) while the rest of us decided to press on without our main. Thankfully we had following winds for the rest of our trip and hardly missed it.

We nosed out and set sail for Capri with another beautiful day for sailing. A bit of an oily swell and Dug’s somewhat amateur butchering of a fish we caught trawling had Chhay & I a little queasy, but by the time we rounded the spectacular looking Capri and settled into a bay on the southern side away from the 140 euro per night marina we were feeling better. We headed ashore and wandered up to Capri itself to lower the tone significantly. A 6 euro gelati soon had us scurrying back aboard to cook dinner for ourselves however.

The bathtub shape of our boat didn’t make for an easy anchorage and as a storm hit again in the small hours we found ourselves dragging once more, this time next to a rather severe looking cliff face! The next morning dawned hot and clear but as we made a quick dash towards our the Amalfi coast to at least get in sight of our initial destination the weather closed in. Having decided not to make landfall we spun around and headed back to Procida, thankfully the wind had turned with us and we could reach our way back at a healthy pace as the islands faded in and out with passing squalls. As we neared the southern tip of Procida the weather cleared and we crept into a delightful bay in the lee of a fort with precarious fishermen’s houses clinging to the sheer hills (below).

With our anchor firmly set and the calmest waters we had experienced we popped in to the town and explored the back streets before settling in to a fantastic seafood feast right on the edge of the fishing harbour, with launches full of people arriving and stepping straight off the boat and to their table.

The final morning we puttered around the island and back to our marina before starting an epic (bus, ferry, tram, train, bus, flight) trip back (40 hours for Dugs) and another night in Rome for Chhay & I.

ouch! under 50 minutes though, so I’m not as unfit as I thought.

With the younger harland venturing offshore for the first time we caught up with him in Rome earlier this month, replacing a conference about the intricacies of radar with some more somnolent pursuits.We managed to actually enter very few of the main attractions, with the exception of the coleseum (below) and the roman forum, spending most of our time wandering & absorbing - a return visit to actually attempt to tackle some of the thousands of museums and churches dotted throughout the centro storico is defiinetly in order.

Highlights for me as usual were the twisty back alleys, framing storybook views of old shops & apartment buildings. We skirted some of the classic pieces but generally tried to avoid the packed throngs surrounding them, limiting Chhay & my’s ability to re-enact Roman Holiday.

the old Jewish ghetto (above) and Trastevere south of the tiber were my favourite areas, smaller in scale and slightly less frenetic but we could have wandered through the entire city for hours more than we did.

Added a couple more to my measly total of Munros last weekend , with a walk with my new office’s climbing club. After a grey start it turned into a glorious day - making hillwalking seem almost fun.

We climbed Ben Starav via the spectacular ridge path (above), with a bit of a scramble up to great views at the summit over Loch Etive and the surrounding glen. After a brief rest we follwed the ridges across to the more gentle (but still over 3,000 ft) but much more difficult to pronounce Glas Bheinn Mor.

The decent was fairly jarring with the occasional stop to refill water bottles from mountain springs (below)

We were rewarded at the end by dipping our toes & washing our faces in a delightful crystal clear rock pool, with a cloudless roof of sky.(below) In case you think Scotland is always like this it returned to grey & miserable today just in case anyone got too cocky and planned a bbq or something!

Today is my last day with jmarchitects - I start with gareth hoskins architects on Monday - lets see if the grass really is greener on the other side…