A house near Taynuilt
A final memory before we leave those happy days - Father took a house near Taynuilt. It was called Polfearn and stood near the mouth of the River Awe where it enters Loch Etive. We spent two months in that beautiful part of the Highlands: and, with our visitors and our cousins the Morrises, Eve, Fred, Roy, Margery and Phil, with Uncle Arthur and Aunt Marnie, we made a large party for walks over the mountains, up the glens, for innumerable boat picnics on Loch Etive, and for many delightful excursions on foot, by train and by steamer, to Oban, Loch Awe, Fort William, Glencoe, and other celebrated scenes of beauty. Every one became proficient in rowing, in bathing, and, to some extent at both river and sea fishing; for we had a section of the river which went with the house; and under the tuition of the old ghyllie McGregor we caught trout and even salmon - if you can call a fourteen pounder a salmon. It was such a happy party, for the Morris cousins were great favourites, and, being of a gradation of similar ages, we all fitted in so pleasantly, Eve and her charming friend, Roy and Fred with Bertram and Arthur, and Margery and Phil with Mary and Frieda.
It was a day of great excitement when we all travelled up from Liverpool in a huge reserved third-class saloon. It is such a grand journey practically all the way from Preston & Lancaster, through Westmorland, Cumberland and the Lowlands, culminating in the grand highland scenery between Callendar and Loch Etive. We saw highland games, we climbed Ben Cruachan and other mountains, we saw numbers of grand waterfalls, wandered through glens where wild raspberries and sloes and hazel nuts grew, and often in the quiet summer evening when the mountains cast their long black reflections on the moon-silvered Loch we would hear the weird haunting music of the pipes. On Sundays we would row across the Loch to the little Church by Bonawe Ferry, which had its windows open to the steep mountainside and we would hear the call of the sea birds and the bleating of the sheep vying with the quiet gentle tones of the Minister's discourse. Actually, it was a little Episcopal chapel, so they would call it a sermon; but it was all so simple and so quiet in an atmosphere of perfect peace. . .