Tag Archives: Glencoe

Tyndrum’s Real Food Cafe runner-up in national customer focus award

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The Real Food Cafe at Tyndrum in Argyll – known for its speciality in freah-caught fish with chips – has won second place in the Heinz PleazMe Customer Focus Award.

The cafe is well placed for travellers in the Highlands. It sits on the road west from Crianlarich at the gateway on the road to the walkers’ and climbers’ mecca of Rannoch Moor and Glencoe and at the junction with the road coming in from south Argyll through Inveraray and Dalmally.

Owner Sarah Howard, delighted at the recognition of the food, atmosphere and service the cafe, reports no sign of the credit crunch (no pun intended, we’re sure) in continuingly strong business.

Three climbers killed in avalanche on Glencoe’s Buachaille Etive Mor

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Three climbers have been killed in an avalanche on Buachaille Etive Mor, the mountain guarding the entrance to Glencoe. Two are brothers in theeir sixties and from Northern Ireland -  Eamonn and John Murphy and one is a Scot from Monifeith, Brian Murray.

Helicopters were called to the mountain at 12.00 on Saturday (24th January) when a total of nine people, in different parties, were caught up in the avalanche. One was an RAF aircraft from Lossiemouth and the other from the Royal Navy’s HNS Gannet.

Buchaille Etive MorThe RAF SAR helicopter from Lossiemouth took two people off the mountain and flew them to Belford Hospital in Fort William. One man was pronounced dead on arrival and the second died later. The third body was found later in the snow.

This afternoon (Sunday 25th police confirmed that there were three dead, including the two brothers.

Tom Richardson, a walker who  survived the avalanche and called the rescue teams said: ‘As I got to the top of the pass, the edge of the slope – it wasn’t corniced – broke away and we were taken down in an avalanche, some of us rode out the top of it and others got buried’.

Five others were rescued from the mountain and one person is being treated for a shoulder injury.

John Grieve, Glencoe Mountain Rescue leader, paid tribute to the team the dead men were with. He said: ‘The first two had been dug out by the party themselves. They did very well. They located one of the buried friends and started resuscitation. Then using their ice axes as probes they quickly located the second member of the party and dug him out as well’.

Northern Constabulary is advising climbers that the risk of avalanches will remain high for the next couple of days. Sport Scotland’s website is putting the risk at category four, on a scale of one to five.

The photograph, by Colin Souze and licensed under Creative Commons, shows a view from the summit of the Devil’s Staircase looking south over the east end of Glen Coe,  towards Buachaille Etive Mòr with Creise and Meall a’ Bhuiridh beyond.

Business as usual at Oban’s Caledonian Hotel, the Ballachulish Hotel and the Isles of Glencoe Hotel

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The above hotels were part of a portfolio of 36 hotels owned by Folio which went into administration in early December 2008. Eighteen of these have now ben acquired in a management buyout by Mulbourn.This is a group of 13 former managers with Matthew Welbourn as Managing Director and Alan Murray as Finance Director. The two men held the same posts under Folio, which will continue to be their flag of convenience.

The deal takes Folio out of administration and saves a total of 1,200 jobs across scotland, 76 of these in Ballachuislish and Glencoe and 36 in Oban.

Hogmanay thugs shoot Big Boy

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Anyone from Argyll or visiting and traveling north through Glencoe on the A82 is likely to have seen Big Boy. He was a stag who had become so used to human company – and the food it tended to hand over – that he was constantly strolling into the big layby viewpoint (with the mobile snack bar) on the steep rise up to Rannoch Moor.

The owner of the snack bar, Earle MacDonald (the right name for Glencoe)  would cut up pieces of vegetables and fruit for him and he would come and eat them out of an apron kept for the purpose.

Then a driver found him lying at the roadside, bleeding from several wounds to his head, weak and in obvious pain. The man contacted the estate gamekeeper who, when he saw the state Big Boy was in, had no option but the humane one – to put him down.

An examination of the stag’s body found five air-gun pellets embedded in his jaw and eye.

The heartbreaking thing is that, unafraid of people and seeing them as a friendly source of food, Big Boy would have come up to his torturers and just stood there while they peppered him.

It has seen a gentle, opportunist and unsuspecting animal dead in pain – and with him the delight he gave to travellers, leaving them with them an indelible memory of a special place.

The Police have put posters up but naturally have no clues to the identity of those who committed this mindless act. It is thought that they were revellers returning from Hogmanay celebrations at the Black Mount in Glencoe. What sort of person takes an air gun along to an event like that? All that can be done is to hope that, as is often the case, what goes around comes around.

Two (plus) top ten visitor activities for Argyll in VisitScotland survey

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View from Rest and Be Thankful in Argyll (photo Richard Heavey, Wikipedia Commons) VisitScotland has just published the results of an online survey it commissioned to discover what visitors to Scotland most enjoyed doing here. Top of the list was watching dolphins in the Moray Firth, followed, in second place by aerial views of Argyll, courtesy of Loch Lomond Seaplanes. In sixth place was picknicking at Rest and Be Thankful, the top of the great pass between Loch Long and Loch Fyne. Walking the West Highland Way was the third most popular activity – and Argyll has a stake in that. Driving through Glen Coe was fourth – an area part of the historical Argyll,even though the changes to local authority boundaries see Glencoe now under Lochaber. What is interesting is that all of these activities indicate that it is Scotland – and Argyll – itself that is the attraction. The majesty, charm and intrigue of the landscape, the emptiness of the sparsely populated Highlands, the wildlife, the opportunities for physical activities of many kinds and the lure of exploration. What are often called ‘activities’ are often anything but that. The VisitScotland survey suggest that visitors come here to find and relish geniune activity.

The photograph above – of the view from Rest and Be Thankful east down Glen Croe to Loch Long – is by Richard Harvey. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modifythe image under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Glen Etive sees first ever use of ‘Spot’ personal GPS in international rescue drama

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Niels Vinther, a Dane now living in Sunderland, was in Glen Etive early yesterday, chasing hs second completion of the annual TGO Challenge. (Participants walk across Scotland, west to east, in under fifteen days.) He started from Oban on Friday and was fifteen miles south of Fort William when he began to suffer severe stomach pains in the early hours of Sunday morning.

After two hours he tried his mobile phone to call for help but could get no signal. At around 3.00am he then activated a GPS Tracker/Alarm system – ‘Spot’ – which he had bought from an American company, Adventure Trading. His trek was being monitored online by a director of this company. When Mr Vinther activated the system’s Emergency Beacon, his message – received by controllers in Texas – read: ‘Help message. I’m immobilised but okay and cannot reach you by phone. Find GEOS on Google map and send help’.

The Emergency Response Centre in Houston, Texas, alerted Police in Fort William immediately after 3.00am, giving them the man’s exact position. At 3.35am HIghland Police had contacted RAF Kinloss and a helicopter was scrambled from Prestwick. At 5.00am Mr Vinther was found and flown to Belford Hospital in Fort William where, last night, a spokesman described his condition as ‘comfortable’.

Mr Vinther praised his rescuers for their swift response. Flight Lieutenant Crawford of RAF Kinloss said that, without the accurate position pinpointing of Mr Vinther’s GPS device, ‘We would have had a start position and where the man was walking to, but the search area would have been huge. The device cut down the amount of time it took us. We launched the helicopter to the position given and there he was. There was no searching. It has saved us an awful lot of time and got this gentleman, who was in a great deal of pain, medical assistance quickly’.

The ‘Spot’ device, which has been used in American, Canada, the North Pole and off the Tasmania coast, has never been activated in Europe before. It could be said to have made its point with no argument.