ARGYLL and the Kintyre Peninsula couldn't be more different from the Highlands of Scotland which I had visited a week earlier.

Where I had found strikingly high mountains, grass and rocky slopes peppered with gorse and lavender, my new destination was all about tranquil glens, wooded hilsides, breathtaking bays and beaches.

The drive from Glasgow to Campbeltown, the main focal point on Kintyre, was slow but scenic. The road hugged the shoreline, heading up one isle and down the next, looking across lochs and then the open sea to the isles of Jura and Islay, and 12 miles distant across the Irish Sea, the mountains of Antrim in Northern Ireland.

I was in Campbeltown for the Mull of Kintyre Half Marathon. Only in its second year, it received plenty of strong reviews from its opening sortie, and though this meant a second trip to Scotland in consecutive weeks I felt this was a race I could not miss.

I arrived in the town on Saturday evening to attend a pasta party at the Aqualibrium - posh name for a swimming pool. It was good to meet Tom Barbour, one of the organisers, who had been very keen in promoting what I was doing with the 80 runs around the British Isles on the race website.

Sunday morning arrived, and the weather was surprisingly good, despite the forecast and the wet weather which the rest of the UK was experiencing. The half marathon runs alongside the 10km event and both races started together before splitting off after one mile.

For the half marathon, the course is a gentle run out into the countryside, past the airport, and along the western coastline where the course heads over sand dunes and onto the beach. This was a first; a half marathon on a beach. The tide was kind, and though the surf rushed up to the edge of the course, there was no danger of getting wet on a 400 metre run up to a point and back.

On the way out, you passed runners navigating their way over the dunes. At one point I was confronted by this fella who took not a blind bit of notice as to where I was going and ran straight into me sending me onto my backside.

I picked myself up and set off again, running for a fair part of the way with a guy called Syd, who is the deputy headmaster of the local school and who I had met the night before at the pasta party.

He'd never run below 1hr 40 minutes for a marathon before and was concerned he would miss out, even though we were well on schedule. I told him to stick on my shoulder and he'd get a personal best guaranteed. We pushed on at a pace, easing into Campbeltown on a gentle downhill stretch to finish in 1 hour 35 minutes and 21st place.

Syd was delighted with the five-minute PB. He kindly offered me hospitality at his home afterwards with a chance to take some tea and get a shower. But I had to decline as I had to shoot back to Edinburgh airport to catch a plane back to Southampton - a 180-mile drive to the Scottish capital along the tight Kintyre roads, which took almost four hours.