Ardminish

I first visited a 'garden' while cruising, when I visited Garnish Island in Glengarriff in my previous boat 'Tricia' about 2014.
Now having visited the Trebah Gardens near the Helford River and the Abbey gardens on Tresco on last year's cruise, it seems to be becoming compulsory to visit a garden on every cruise. So today I was going ashore to visit Achamore Gardens.

The gardens were established by a previous owner of Gigha who also owned the house in the gardens but now the house is privately owned while the gardens were left after his death to the Scottish Trust. The island was bought by the community in 2002 so you could almost call it a socialist island

But first I had to have a nice shower so I turned on the heating to dry out the heads once I was finished and also to keep me nice and warm until I was decent again.
This was followed by a toasted tuna sandwich and coffee and then I was ready to face the world.

It was still cloudy and cool when I got ashore so the 2 km. walk on empty country roads was lovely and pleasant. By the time I got to the gardens the sun had returned and it began to heat up.

I met a nice couple from Yorkshire who were caravanning on the mainland but had come on the morning ferry and were visiting for the day. It turned out that they had previously visited the gardens 20 years before. After a pleasant conversation I left them off to walk around on their own with their memories.

As I wandered around the gardens the shade became welcome as the day got very hot. To my untrained eye, the gardens while nice seemed a little neglected but maybe it was just the time of the year.

I stopped on the way back for a coffee and a brownie at the community hall which had a coffee shop, a gift shop and an gallery for local artists.
I got chatting with the girl who served me as she was wearing a Saw Doctors t-shirt. It turned out she was from Coventry and only here for the summer. The accent should have been a big giveaway that she wasn't local! It turned out she has Irish parents and is a regular at Saw Doctors concerts in Britain. It's a small world.

I visited the ruins of an old church and graveyard founded by an Irish saint, St. Cathan.
One of the headstones I found was of the Galbraith family. A son of theirs was mentioned on the headstone was being Callum Galbraith who died at the Cork Military Hospital in 1918.
I had visited a patient in this hospital in the 1970's in Collins Barracks but was known as Victoria Barracks when Callum died there.

After I returned to Ireland I found that this soldier, under the name of Malcolm Galbraith is commemorated in a park off Assumption Road which was the military cemetery for the nearby Victoria Barracks but is now maintained as a public park. The names of the 83 service men buried there are listed on a memorial in the park. The original headstones for those who had died between 1914-18 were brought to Grangegorman Military Cemetery on Blackhorse Avenue in Dublin and placed near a memorial wall that has the names of soldiers whose graves elsewhere in Ireland were no longer possible to maintain following independence.
(In a surprising coincidence when I visited the Cork memorial in 2023 I discovered that Callum was serving with the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders which was the same regiment that my own grandfather served with between 1914 -16)

I called to 'The Boathouse' again on my way back to the bay to have a pint, just the one mind you and sat outside in the sun while reading my book but a breeze started and I had to put on my jacket as it began to cool down again.

I called to the little village shop at the top of the pier to get some supplies and headed back to Eureka to make dinner.

As I started my journey out, I saw 'Oronsay' one of the Moodys that was at the rally in Dun Laoghaire. I hadn't expected to meet up again. I knew they were heading to Scotland but thought they would be far north of me by this stage as they had left Dun Laoghaire to head north a day or two before me.
It turned out that for some reason they had to stop for a couple of days in Belfast and were only now catching up with me.
The owner Keith had been keeping an eye out for me when he saw Eureka moored in the bay so I got a big wave as I headed out in the dinghy and I headed over to say hello and have a chat before they headed ashore and I headed for Eureka.

I finished the day by reporting in to Maeve and later turning on the radio. Lilian Smith standing in for Johnny Creedon. Feck! you can't have everything.もっと詳しく