Dunure

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What can be more exciting than heading for some place you've never been before? I didn't know Dunure existed until I picked up a leaflet in a tourist information office. It was titled, 'Paths Around Maybole', and in it Dunure is described as 'the most picturesque of Ayrshire's former fishing communities with its 200 year old harbour overlooked by original cottages.' You will therefore understand when I tell you that it was with no small amount of excitement that I followed one of those paths, a seven mile trek from Maybole to Dunure. But the thing about paths is that there are paths and there are paths. The Maybole to Dunure path is not for the fainthearted. I deviated from the route marked in the leaflet, and instead followed a Carrick Way sign that pointed towards Dunure.  It led onto a wild high moor, and if it hadn't been for the pleasant clear weather and an absence of mist I would have become well and truly lost. It brought me eventually back onto the leaflet path, but I somehow lost my way, went one way instead of another, and ended up frantically leaping from tussock to tussock in bogs so deep I was sure I could see the hairy submerged tops of the heads of walkers who didn't quite make it. When finally I arrived in Dunure I was liberally drenched in mud, had various bits of a forest stuck to me, and felt that I might weep at the first person I came across. Which is why one day in Dunure the locals were confronted by a brown oozy man pointing and shrieking hysterically: 'PATH!'