Scotland Diary: Galloway Forest
After making my way up to Manchester to meet Rachel, we had to make a short stop in Carlisle where Rachel is originally from. Unfortunately, her grandmother passed away and Rachel needed to attend the funeral, so we stayed in Carlisle at a campsite called Camping at Cardewles.
We treated this little stop as a test run of sorts, Rachel had never camped before and this meant she had never set up a tent. As a keen camping enthusiast in my younger years, I was happy to teach Rachel the basics because this is how we were going to be living for the unforeseeable.
I bought Geraldine (our beautiful and outlandishly green tent) roughly a week before heading up North. She was a 5 or 6-man tent, which sounds ridiculous now as there were only two of us, but I knew we would want space and something a little more homely. Let’s face it, we weren’t off hiking through the Himalayas, this was just a fun silly road trip with two women that were winging it at every turn.
I’d only set Geraldine up once in my parent’s garden before the trip, it wasn’t difficult, and by the end of our camping days, we could set her up and pull her down in under 10 minutes. On this first occasion in Carlisle though, packing Geraldine away was a whole different story. Try and picture two grown women rolling on top of a flattened groundsheet trying to expel all air from the tent and you might come close to the real image…
At the Carlisle campsite, our neighbours were a small family with 2 little girls and our nights consisted of waking up at all hours, battling the freezing cold. By the end of it, we were both a bit spaced out and exhausted. Rachel was especially irritated as the little girls had begun to question whether or not she was my mother. I, on the other hand, found this hilarious.
Rachel in her element, cooking just beside Geraldine…
When we eventually arrived in Scotland we decided to pitch up in Galloway. What we hadn’t anticipated though, was for every single campground to be completely fully booked! As we sat in a little cafe eating our last homely meal for a while, we aggressively trawled through google for all the campsites we could possibly find to find a spot to stay for the night.
Luckily Rachel found one in Galloway Forest called Glentrool Camping and Caravan Site. The man running the site was lovely and had the brightest blue eyes. No idea about the rest of the face as it was covered in a mask.
Glentrool was definitely a more commercial campsite, far less rural with all modern facilities. Tents were in close proximity and the ground was particularly hard. And the midges. Oh god, the midges. They were ruthless, so we took to calling this site MidgeyVille Tennesse. No idea where we thought that up, it just sounded very apt.
Rachel and I attempted to set up Geraldine on the rock-hard floor, but for some reason, she wasn’t having any of it. We couldn’t get her up at all. She felt far too heavy for her own good but we continued to persevere and push her up until *snap*… one of the tent poles broke. In a slight fit of agitation, we dropped the poles and succumbed to the floor. Why was it so difficult to set up the second time around?
Rachel decided to pull the 2-man tent out of the car that we had packed especially for wild camping and set that one up instead, but once we inspected it, something just didn’t look right. There was no groundsheet! So whilst Rachel was on the phone with her dad arguing that she’d taken the wrong tent, I came to the conclusion that Geraldine was too heavy because we hadn’t taken the separate room down from the inside. With no tape and no rope to hand, I whipped out my first aid kit and fixed the tent pole up with durable plasters. Rachel got inside to undo the separate room toggles and I slid the poles back through the roof.
Geraldine was up. And we felt completely done in.
That night, we made the simplest meal we could think of and went straight to bed for an early night and hopefully, a decent sleep. That was until several shouting families turned up all at the same time with their over-excited children. The bellows and screams echoed all throughout the campsite and lasted well into the night.
Needless to say, we only lasted one night at Glentrool. Aka MidgeyVille Tennesse.
The infamous Black Loch which turned out to not be the Black Loch at all…
The next day, we packed Geraldine up and got excited for our first full day of adventure. We were off to Loch Trool! The whole point of this journey was to wild camp as much as we could and what with it being a Saturday (no bookings available anywhere) there was no time like the present.
Of course, here come the mistakes…
First, we went for a hike searching for the ‘Black Loch’. We found a loch, it looked black but it certainly wasn’t the loch. With about a thousand wrong turns and the heat becoming unbearable, Rachel completely switched off. Now, I must let you know, I have known Rachel for quite a number of years now, and there’s one thing I always try to avoid - a hungry Rachel. Because she doesn’t just get hungry, she gets angry and hungry. I didn’t truly know what ‘hangry’ meant until I met her and unfortunately, this was just one of those times. Our boots were hurting our feet, rubbing against our toes and the summer sunshine was beating down on us with no reprieve. We had to get back to the car.
Roughly an hour and a half later, we finally made it back to the car where Rachel could have something to eat and I could be free of her wrath.
The worst was over. Or so we thought.
Cracking shot of Susan the Suzuki right there…
After destressing in the only way we know how, blaring out 80’s rock music whilst singing at the top of our lungs, we arrived at the start of Loch Trool.
As we scanned the car for all the bits we might need for the night, it suddenly dawned on us how underprepared we were for wild camping. Our gas stove was too big to take with us, our pillows were not designed for travel and the familiar feeling of backpacking agony was already starting to settle in on our unfit bodies.
Were we ready for this? Of course we were, we assured ourselves. We’d read up on how beautiful the scenery was and convinced ourselves that the hike wouldn’t be too treacherous. We decided that if we got hungry we would just trek back to the car to make dinner, after all, we wouldn’t be too far away. So on we went.
2 hours into this hike, we still hadn’t found anywhere to pitch the tent. Rachel had been bitten, I was bleeding and worse still, it began to rain. We felt defeated, and I’m confident we looked it too.
There was a point where we both sat down on the cliff edge and simply looked at each other. We both knew what the other was thinking; it was time to knock this on the head. We either keep going, with no food. Or we turn back. So as you can imagine, we chose the latter and repeated the exact steps to take us back to the car.
Seeing Susan the Suzuki in plain sight was the most wonderful thing that had happened to us that day. She was a beacon of hope. Our little home. And when we made it back to her for the second time that day, we were grateful for the shelter.
Whilst sitting in the passenger seat with the door open and my bare feet hanging over the side, I began to think of possible solutions to our situation.
In the end, I whipped my phone out and did something I said I would never do, something I’m not proud of at all.
I booked a B&B.
Read the next entry ‘Scotland Diary: Galloway and Fairlie’
