Taexalia

wild.life

Highlands and Islands In a Week part 2

I've cobbled together a map, which I think has a centimetre missing, to give an idea of the routes we took. My road map only shows up A class and B class roads so the struggling-to-be-a -single-track-road roads we took in some places aren't there. But you get the picture

Sunday's trip was prompted by Dad asking "What do you want to do tomorrow?" and my reply of "Hmmm well I've never really seen much of Sutherland and aren't there some really cool beaches up there?"

So we set off around 9:30am not really knowing the Plan - Dad likes to just surprise people. At least one of my readers knows this

We drove through Inverness and crossed the Kessock Bridge, which marks where the Beauly Firth flows into the Moray Firth, and headed into the unknown. Well not really unknown because I did recognise some place names from the distant past - like Garve which is on the railway line to Kyle of Lochalsh... but that's another story... After Garve though, we were on a road I had never travelled.

One thing I love is watching weather and I particularly like watching weather in Scotland. I love to see the Cailleach dancing and being moody at one end of my vista whilst the other end is sunshine and blue sky. I think the lochs, firths and glens exist as little more than a dancefloor for the old weather hag.

We came out onto a fairly straight piece of road right beside a loch and saw our first rainbow - if I was going to name our days then Sunday might be Rainbow Day or The Day of Many Coloured Arches or something... Anyway there was much noise from us kids in the back about stopping the car for a photo op. Given the scenery, it's a surprise we travelled any distance at all since us kids often appear to have one hand and one camera

The Cailleach's ominous skirts at the top of Loch Glascarnoch... meanwhile...

... turning 180 degrees and the loch looks warm and inviting and Ben Wyvis snow covered slopes sparkle in the sunshine.

Standing at the edge of that road, by the by, is not for the faint hearted. There may not be much traffic - but when one goes past it's at quite a pace!

Moving on, we came upon the rainbow road - this is where the pic I posted the other day was taken. I'll put all the rainbow pics in Flickr later on as well as a larger selection of the others.

This is just an average view from the road and as wordy as I can be, I cannot think of words with enough syllables. The peak in the centre is Stac Pollaidh and I have decided that I am going to climb it one day. I imagine the view from the top could be just as stunning

As if we hadn't seen enough, Dad continued on to Ullapool and I was practically out of the car with my credits cards to try and find a house to buy. @ became adept at nodding indulgently at my every utterance of "we could live here"...

We continued on through remote wilderness - so remote that we could not even see the ubiquitous sheep - and found ourselves in the very remote Kinlochbervie. We were hungry and blessed by the local Spar, and we were lucky enough to be there during the two hours of Sunday trading allowing us to create an impromptu picnic of cheese and ham pasties, squeezy cheese baps, crisps and Irn Bru.

Now if the road to Kinlochbervie wasn't scenic or narrow enough, we downsized onto little more than a squiggle on the map and twisted and turned our way to a car park in the community of Blairmore. It was then we realised that Dad was taking us to Sandwood Bay. Well that was the plan. Unfortunately Dad had forgotten that Sandwood Bay is 4.5miles from the road. That's a 9 mile round trip. It would have been perfectly do-able in June but we figured out that we would be walking some of the way back in the dark.

We did walk out for a bit, a mile or so, before deciding that Sandwood Bay was for another day. We did see millions and millions of frogspawn in the still puddles at the edge of the track - we think there may have been a mix of frogs and toads, or a mix of species. If it was all one frog then they were spawning in different styles and colours and VERY busy!