Puck's Glen — Stomping Feat.

Oct 17

Oct 17 Puck's Glen

Birthday’s seem somehow strange when you are overseas. And when you are younger than you sometimes feel, the partying and staying up late parts of birthday’s tend to slip away. Luckily for me, the good food and friends part of my Birthday were the treat.

I spent my birthday day taking myself out for lunch, reading a book in the bath and generally relaxing, before Andy took me out for a spectacular dinner. Perfect.

My birthday weekend was just as fantastic, filled with food and friends and finding new places.

Puck’s Glen is an hour and half drive from Glasgow, so we have put off visiting until now. With new visitors to Scotland, we decided a drive in the Scottish Autumn was in order, so we headed west. The oldest forest park in the UK, Argyll Forest Park is a beautiful area we were keen to explore.

Puck’s Glen is a Victorian walkway, carefully built along a gorge. It was planted in 1800s with seeds from the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest in Canada and the USA. In the intervening decades years, the place has overgrown well and is now maybe Scotland’s only ‘temperate rainforest’.

The forest definitely has a different vibe from other Scottish forests we have rambled through. Maybe it is this transplanted North American ecosystem, or maybe it is the faeries and magic that are said to inhabit the place.

Puck is a mischievous nature sprite in folklore and also character in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. We didn’t spot him on the day we visited, but the softness with which the light hit the moss covered stones and branches sometimes made a familiar shadow appear in my peripheries. I’m sure Puck was there.

Memories of reading Enid Blyton’s Enchanted Forest rush over me as we wander and watch. It is no wonder people have been drawn to the magic of the gorge for 150 years.

Well worth the drive, Puck’s Glen is a bewitching and beauty in the Argyll Forest Park. Combined with our lunch stop at the delightful Inver Restaurant (30 minutes up the road), our Sunday drive was all I could’ve hoped for my Birthday weekend.