Английский язык. Рассказы. Уровень В2+

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.

The weather is amazing, as it changes every fifteen or twenty minutes, so it can be pouring down with rain one minute, and then bright and sunny the next.

Anyway, we camped in the north-west corner where there is a farmer who lets you camp on his land, which is basically a strip of grass next to the beach. It’s a lovely sandy beach with lots of driftwood, so we made a fire there and sat around it cooking soup in an old pot that he lent us and baking potatoes in the fire, drank a bottle of whisky, walked up and down collecting nicely shaped pieces of driftwood and watched the sun set on the horizon.

Holidays in Scotland

1. Where did Joey and his pals go off camping?

2. What was special about the place where they put up their tents?

3. How did they spend the day?

4. What were their plans for the evening?

5. Why did they decide to go across the golf course?

6. What did the course have?

7.