Английский язык. Рассказы. Уровень В2+ - стр. 11

The pub was nothing special, but we had a few drinks there, and when we finally got back, taking the road instead of returning across the golf course, we couldn’t find the tents, or even the peninsula on which we’d camped. “What’s going on? What’s happened? Where are our tents?” we asked ourselves. It turned out that the area where we’d set up the tents wasn’t really a peninsula at all, but that when the tide came in it became an island. So, the tide had come in and cut us off from our tents. For the second time that evening we got wet feet, as to reach our tents we had to roll up our trousers, take off our shoes and socks and wade across to them.

At the time I was living in Elgin in the district of Moray, which is quite a nice area in the East of Scotland. It’s famous for not having any thunderstorms. It has the fewest thunderstorms of anywhere in Britain, and is also well known for its whisky, as it is in the heart of the whisky distilling area, and has much fertile land for growing barley, and nearby there are hills where there is peat and fresh spring water, which you need to make whisky. So, all of the famous whiskies come from there, like Glenfiddich and Glengrant, for example. There’s a shop there where many of them are bottled, called Gordon Simpson’s or something like that, and this shop sells about five hundred types of whisky, all from local producers. They have really special whiskies there, some thirty years old. In this shop we found a bottle which was produced at a distillery which I used to live next door to, called the Longmorne distillery, and even though we lived right next to this distillery we had never sampled its produce, so we bought a bottle. It was awful. It tasted like paint-stripper!

Another time I went camping was on the Isle of Iona. We camped in the north-west corner, I think. Iona is a very special island, which is historically important because Saint Columba lived there and founded a monastery there – he was the man who brought Christianity, in the form of the Celtic church, to Scotland, from Ireland. The story goes that he left on a very small boat from Ireland and stopped on another island further south and wanted to settle there but discovered that from this island they could still see Ireland, so they moved on to Iona, from which they couldn’t see Ireland, so they wouldn’t feel homesick.

It’s a very beautiful island, with the monastery, a very nice mediaeval church, and beautiful, very ancient rocks, which, due to the movement of the geographical strata, consist of lovely, pretty, marble-type old rocks. There is a very special, unique, magical atmosphere there. The water surrounding the coast is very clear and blue, and there are some wonderful clean beaches there, with little rock-pools dotted about with little fish, crabs, and starfish in them, and lots of seaweed and driftwood scattered along the shore.