Hay's Way: Scotland's shortest ferry ride, warm hospitality and a poem from a window

The hop, skip and jump over a stretch of water measuring just 410m took me from Rhubodach, on the northern tip of Bute, to Colintraive on the Cowal peninsula. It narrowly beats the 500m Gallanach to Kerrera crossing near Oban.

To my surprise, the ferryman aboard the MV Dunvegan had not seen me — the only foot passenger — climb aboard with my bulging bag.

When he spotted me about two minutes into the crossing he told me I need not bother paying the £1.70 fare given we were already halfway.

I have had an amusing reintroduction to the realities of finding somewhere to camp and work since getting back on the road after my trip to the US to cover the World Cup.

While sat writing an article and having a meal in the Colintraive Hotel before pitching my tent a lovely couple, Thierry and Patrick, struck up conversation. They had travelled from their holiday home further up the loch on a children’s RIB. An offer of a bed in their family-packed house came fairly quickly. But after taking a second look at my unwieldy rucksack, it was agreed that the small inflatable boat might sink if I hopped on.

I suppose I could have had a go at swimming, following in the footsteps, or rather hoofprints, of the cattle that were once swum across the narrow channel between Colintraive and Bute. Until the late 1800s, drovers used the crossing to move herds towards lowland markets in places such as Glasgow and Falkirk. The bovine bathe even gave Colintraive its Gaelic name, Caol an t-Snàimh, meaning “the narrows of the swimming”.

Within minutes, though, while paying for my dinner and asking a member of staff to fill my hot water bottle ahead of a night in the tent, local resident, Deirdre, offered me a bed.

The experience was an extension to the warm hospitality I felt on Bute. As readers will know, the island community took me in as though I were a local. Suzanne, who runs Bute Backpackers, where I spent several nights sheltering from the rain, is mostly to thank for that.

When I tried to leave the island to continue my walk round Scotland I was pulled back in several times, once courtesy of the Bute Writing Group who gathered together one afternoon at the hostel. When they saw me packing my rucksack, curiosity got the better of them.

“Someone who walks and writes about it? Well, why don’t you write with us, then walk?” one of them suggested. And that was me sucked in for several hours.

One of the group’s members, a former lecturer in English at Sussex University, Peter Ryley, had not long moved to Bute. He told me he’d found an affinity with the island during a difficult period in his life.

He shared with me a poem he had written shortly after arriving at the hostel, where he was given room 12, coincidentally, the same room I was in:

I shall carry the mountains, I shall carry the sea; The ferry cutting the water, Inbound to the island quai; I shall carry the big sky; Dogs, walkers, the everyday; I shall carry deep memories To my home in the faraway.