In 1992 Elizabeth attended a dinner at Magdalen College at which she met a fellow Cambridge student who was due to do her teaching practice at The Plume school and was looking for lodgings in Maldon. On the strength of what we earned from Susan staying with us, our 1993 summer holiday was the most ambitious holiday yet, the location - a small village on the west coast of Scotland called Kilchoan - chosen by David. Although Katy had left home we invited everyone and, somewhat to our surprise, the whole family came.
We took a croft house - Mull View, above - for a week and travelled up by train to Inverness, where we hired a Discovery to take us to Kilchoan. The weather was surprisingly good for August, though....
....as happens on the west coast, there were a few duller days - this is the beach near Mingary Castle.
This holiday changed the course of our lives for we fell in love with Ardnamurchan and, as a result, came back....
....as often as we possibly could, even buying a car, a lovely white Volvo 240 automatic estate, that enabled us to do the run north from Essex in just under 12 hours.
Lizzie was still based at home so she sometimes came up with us, David came during his holidays, and we also took a cottage on two occasions with our long-time friends, the Hizzards.
This is beach cricket at Sanna with David, Rachael and the Hizzards. By this time we were seriously thinking of moving up to the west coast. Then, on one of our visits to Sanna, I fell into conversation with a woman who told us that the shop in Kilchoan was for sale. We took a look at it but found it in very poor condition so decided not to show any further interest, looking instead at a number of other businesses locally, none of which suited us.
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