Wester Ross Weekend

With promising signs from the Norwegians we decided to spend two days on the mainland, exploring Wester Ross. Wester Ross is basically the coastline from Kyle of Lochalsh north to Ullapool. It is a wonderful mixture of mountains, lochs and coastlines with little wooded islands and white coral beaches, whitewashed houses and general highland grandeur.

At Lochcarron, the loch was completely still. We watched the tide come in without a ripple - the water just spread over the rocks as we watched.

Then we drove over the Bealach na Bà - the road to Applecross. It's a famous single-track road that zigzags up to a pass over the mountain and then down to Applecross, which is a series of small villages on a beautiful bay that faces out towards Skye.

Views from the top back towards Skye...

At Applecross we found a wonderful cafe in a Victorian walled garden on the estate of Applecross House. Whole thing was gorgeous. Applecross House rather elegant..

Cafe hidden at the back of the walled garden...

Flowers!

And an old orchard in one corner: they are restoring it in sections. Loved the shape of these trees

We drove down to Toscaig and took a walk out to the coast - where there were more coral beaches.

Amazing geology everywhere...

Especially gneiss at this time of year....

These houses have no road access, but they do have sheep....how do they get there?

The lochs are fringed with golden seaweed and there are lots of little islands and rock stacks...very clear water....

Coraline seaweed beach....

Thistle!

The beaches end up in stripes of rock types and seaweed - all the pink rocks were about the same size and shape...

After the beach, we checked out the ancient monuments. Applecross and Wester Ross generally have hundreds of round house remains, the odd broch and standing stone etc.

As we parked the car we noticed we were not alone.

Apparently someone fed a hind for a few days because she was injured and the following week arrived back in from hanging out the washing to find her leaving the kitchen with a banana. I can believe it.

These are restored Hebridean barns - the whicker panels are what used to be there - they were thatched but they need to be kept waterproof now.

Restored roundhouse - gave a nice sense of what it would be like to live in one.

Unrestored broch

But they are going to put an interpretation centre in the barns, so that will help!

Then we drove to Shieldaig to stay the night - views of Skye from the road.

Shieldaig is another little proper community which is working together in order to survive (as is Gairloch further up the road). We stayed at the end of the loch in a B and B, and walked the 20mins or so down to town for dinner.

This is looking back down the road towards our B and B - we were in the white cottage on the right.

Shieldaig as we approached

I will do a separate post about the sunset, which was something else again!

On Sunday we drove the coast road from Shieldaig to Ullapool. The tourist people have invented a thing called the 'NC 500' which is a 500-mile drive around the coast of North Scotland. You can get t-shirts and mugs and tea towels and things and it's becoming very popular. This makes the single track roads a bit difficult, and like in NZ results in a proliferation of camper vans - lots of motorcyclists do it too. It is very beautiful, so you can't blame them - but it is busy and apparently in summer it's a bit of a drama.

The road was wonderful and the places interesting. Gairloch has a very active community group that run a visitors centre, and we found a marvellous bookshop and cafe for lunch. The bookshop was carefully curated on several themes, all of which resonated with John who would like to have taken the entire thing home.

Great quote in the bookshop, which casts new light on Mum and Dad's book collection

We were particularly taken with the 'lumpy rock' hills, which turn out to be gneiss. We have a great map of Scottish geology hanging in our bedroom!

Using the 'something will come along' John travel principle we came across a walk through the gneiss to a view of Loch Maree, a big land-locked loch (!) with islands in it.

There were power poles all the way along the track. What do these highlanders need with electricity???

Fabulous giant stepping stones, with the Hatted Hobgoblin, whose hat has had to be sacrificed to me, because my hat is AWOL. I'm sure all the many admirers of my hat will be as gutted as I am.

Then we drove on up to Ullapool, where ferries go to Lewis. Larger and a bit more gritty, Ullapool did feel a bit like the edge of the world.

You can still see the Highland-ness in the background though....

Another great weekend!!!