Fascadail Country Guest House & Jo’el Worldwear Giftshop

01/07/2026

So we have discovered yet another gap that affects Arrochar where our BNB is located. There’s no carer agencies that cover Arrochar! Help! Is anyone in Arrochar, Tarbet, Cairndow, Ardlui, along Loch Lomond a nurse or professional carer???

25/06/2026

Happenings at Fascadail in one week: 1) had the village teens over for a BBQ and they were all so much fun, so sweet and kind…hope to do it again in the future! 2) Karen rescued a hedgehog from the road outside, fed her, cared for her, and then released her to her new home deep in our garden…we’ve named her Emily! 3) Stuart’s Mom has come to live with us and already seen the beauty of Fascadail. We are so fortunate to have our lovely lady with us now! And Snowball now insists on sleeping most of the night with her in her own room!

19/06/2026

Wow

🗿 It is nearly seven metres tall. It was carved in the ninth or tenth century from a single slab of local sandstone. It depicts something — a battle, an ex*****on, a military victory — in more narrative detail than any other Pictish monument in existence, its carved panels a continuous account of combat and its consequences that takes several minutes to fully examine. We do not know what event it commemorates. We do not know who ordered it carved. We do not know the name of the sculptor or the name of the battle depicted.

Sueno's Stone at Forres is the largest and most complex Pictish carved monument in Scotland, a category it wins with such overwhelming margin that no other stone in the tradition comes close. The name Sueno — a reference to the Danish king Sweyn Forkbeard — is a medieval attribution that modern scholars consider entirely fanciful, the stone predating Sweyn and having no apparent connection to Danish history. The real history it commemorates is inaccessible — the events depicted are too specific and too detailed to be generic, but the specific events they record are unknown.

The carved narrative on the stone's main face is extraordinary in its violence and its clarity — ranks of bound prisoners, scenes of decapitation, heaped headless bodies, mounted warriors — a visual record of military dominance and its exercise over defeated enemies that is completely unlike the more symbolic vocabulary of earlier Pictish carved stones. Something specific happened here, and someone with the authority and the resources to commission a seven-metre carved monument wanted it remembered in permanent stone.

The stone is in a glass enclosure because the acid rain of the twentieth century was dissolving it faster than acceptable. The enclosure was a controversial decision — some felt it diminished the stone's presence — but it has preserved it.

It is still there. Seven metres of ninth-century narrative. What happened, we cannot say.

17/06/2026

We’ll be glad when our amazing roofer Andrew who owns Forth Valley Roofing starts the final new areas in the middle of the main roof and then replaces the one-story roof….then we can have our perfect stained-glass window view back without scaffolding! Lol