When: May 2012
Where: Scotland
Circa May 2012, a few of us from the Geneva Bong-gang (namely Kranti, Pavel and I) decided upon a Scottish road-trip partially owing to the fact that our esteemed Dr Kar (an erstwhile Geneva resident) had then moved base to Glasgow and we decided to make good use of his station.
Where: Scotland
Circa May 2012, a few of us from the Geneva Bong-gang (namely Kranti, Pavel and I) decided upon a Scottish road-trip partially owing to the fact that our esteemed Dr Kar (an erstwhile Geneva resident) had then moved base to Glasgow and we decided to make good use of his station.
A high level route
of our trip was along the lines of: Glasgow- Loch-Lomond - Oban - Fort William
- Isle of Skye and back - Loch-Ness - Inverness - round the north shore to
Aberdeen - Stonehaven - Dundee - Perth - Stirling - Glasgow.
While writing about
our entire Scotland trip - even a synopsis - would take quite awhile, given the
sights, sounds and whiskies of the land & I will try to do it justice
sometime; one of the incidents that stand out is our discovery of the Commando
Memorial near Lochaber in the Scottish highlands.
This incident
took place while we were on our way upwards from Loch Lomond via Fort
Williams towards Eileen Donan and then Isle of Skye.
From Fort Williams
onwards we had started getting quite a bit of hill terrain where the roads were
undulating with the sway of the hillocks and the glens…and before long we had
Dr Kar (also sometimes referred to as Deepak) and Kranti complaining of nausea
with threats of a pukish follow-through.
We were on the A82 highway having just crossed the Spean river and couldn't
make a stop without a proper shoulder as it was a 2-lane highway mostly. With assurances
flowing thickly from Pavel and I that we would definitely stop at the next opportunity that he gets while hoping
fervently the other two manages to hold it in for sometime we raced towards the
next rest-pit on the highway.
Anyways, pretty soon
we figured a sort of flatland opening ahead on the left side of the highway
with a couple of cars swinging onto it and a statue of some kind rising up from
there. Figuring it must either be a pit-stop or a view-point and seriously testing
the sickness-retention capacity of Kranti and Deepak we swung onto it…and even
before we stepped out of the car we knew this would be one of the finds of our
trip!!
(Did I forget to
mention that in all of this antiperistatical excitement we had failed to
register that we were driving almost against a backdrop of the Aonach Mor and
Ben Nevis…? This is what we were amidst...)
Ben Nevis and the Aonach Mor range |
After taking in the
absolutely majestic surroundings where we landed up -Ben Nevis towering right
up front with the Aonach Mor range skirting it, the glens on the other sides
and the Commandos' statue in the midst of it all, we started reading upon the antecedents
of the statue and the history behind it.
It figured that we had stumbled upon one of the
oldest commando training grounds in the war history with this facility being
set up during World War II for the original British Commando Forces and the
statue was a commemoration to it and has come to signify the spirit, bravery
and valour of Commandos since. It was like the prequel to the present British
Commando forces like the SAS and all the ones worldwide which had drawn from
this mode of specialized soldiers.
Some of the gutsiest men that walked the earth....whose lives might have been the stuff movies were made of....
This link might help to get a snapshot upon the history : Commando_Memorial
"United We Conquer" |
...also there was the 'Garden of Tributes'; where friends and families of fallen
Commando soldiers would pay their tributes to the fallen brave...the love of the Country and God etched forever in the memory of those who knew and these poignant surroundings.
In memory of those who made the maximum sacrifice in the line of duty |
The tributes, the sentries and the mountains beyond... |
A
wonderful find and one that stands out as a memory from Scotland.
2 comments:
Almost as good as the animated Pavel and Kranti version... I only miss the descriptions of what you guys ate!
Almost as good as the animated Pavel and Kranti version... I only miss the descriptions of what you guys ate!
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