The Cuillins can be a scary place!
It is just about possible to do the whole ridge without rock-climbing experience and equipment – if you know the routes round numerous impassable-looking obstacles. I don’t. I’ve scared myself more on the Cuillins than on any other hills.
The lower slopes are also dramatic, steep corries of huge rock slabs, piled boulders and waterfalls.
At the heart of the range is two-mile-long Loch Coruisk, deep and dark under soaring mountainsides.
Loch Coruisk is usually approached via a path from the Elgol road, a rough rocky track to Camasunary Bay, then an extremely steep, boggy, stony route round the side of Sgurr na Stri culminating with a scramble across a little rockface dropping into the sea – the infamous “Bad Step”.
Loch Coruisk is then just a short walk up the river from Loch Scavaig which, in summer, is a favourite spot for yachts to moor, while a succession of tourist boats bring people on day trips from Elgol. There is also a climbing hut on the shore and the busyness of this spot can be something of an anticlimax – the mountains though are anything but.
A number of years ago, I was struggling along that path which, even for an experienced hillwalker, is just too rough and wet to be enjoyable. A lone kayaker came past on the sea below, gliding seemingly effortlessly up the loch – and I finally decided I would have to take up sea-kayaking.
It took longer than expected – only after five years of paddling could I happily set off on my own from Elgol knowing the journey was well within my capabilities and that even if the wind picked up unexpectedly to force five after a night or two of camping, I would be able to complete the return trip safely.
The day was to be a long one. I’d left Uig Hostel on north Skye at seven and driven over 50 miles to Elgol – Skye is a surprisingly big place! At 8.30am the tiny village was already bustling. The morning was clear and sunny, the view from here to the Cuillins is a classic, celebrated on a million calendars and postcards.
The tiny primary school looks straight across the loch to the mountains and children were arriving, mostly ferried by car, on what must be one of Scotland’s more scenic school runs. But already the car parks were almost full with people who had come for a boat trip to Loch Coruisk.
Elgol is a paradoxical place, like many in the Highlands. The scenery is that of heaven, but the community very much of this earth. Turn your back on that view and it’s quite a tatty scene, two big car parks, the usual harbour detritus and several portable cabins and the like used by the boat operators.
Unfriendly notices proclaim “No overnight parking” – which is, of course, what all the climbers and hillwalkers heading for the Cuillin Ridge need to do. If the parking spaces are taken up, that means less business. Indeed, three different boats now compete for the Coruisk trips, charging £20 a head.
By putting on evening runs more money can be made, but that has led to conflict with the fishermen who need to land lobsters, crabs and langoustines at the harbour. There’s just a bit of the attitude, which so often lets the Highlands down, that tourists are a resource to be exploited and a nuisance to be tolerated.
THE paddle across to the end of Loch Scavaig was almost too easy, sunshine and rippling water, that stunning view straight ahead. I pottered along below steep hillsides, catching glimpses of the rough path which would have given a morning of toil and labour with a full pack under a hot sun.
Coasting across the loch to land on the flank of Gars Bheinn, I pitched the tent just above high water and enjoyed an early lunch. Four yachts were moored and already boat after boat was bringing the tourists past.
Even by Cuillin standards Gars Bheinn is a steep mountain, soaring 3000 feet from the sea at Loch Scavaig in just over a mile. The ascent is by no means easy, as I remember from previous visits, indeed possibly the steepest of any in Scotland.
My plan was to take a wander up and carry on along the ridge as far as I felt like, making my way back down in the evening when the weather was forecast to deteriorate. Craning my neck backwards to look at that peak would get me nowhere, I’d just have to start climbing… and over two hours later finally gained the summit, after much awkward route-finding and scrambling around steep slabs and screes and rock.
Better than my first attempt by the north-west ridge when, almost at the top, a vertical rockface barred the way. With no way round I managed, eventually, to climb it (I was younger then).
Far below, rippling seas, the low Isle of Soay and beyond the hills of Rhum, with rain already starting to encroach. The sun had gone behind a sheet of cloud, so I’d have to hurry as I didn’t fancy going down the route I’d climbed and the next relatively easy way off was two miles of narrow, scrambling, rooftop away.
The last I wanted was to be up here in mist and rain, and this was the easiest bit of the ridge. Unused to such steep mountains, I already had that edgy, nervous feeling the Cuillins engender – which is somehow soon forgotten so that you want to go back for another attempt!
On the next summit, An Eag, I caught up with two others who hadn’t been watching the weather and were rather horrified the first spots of rain were now falling. Scrambling through the piled boulders, it was with some relief I reached the col which gave a descent route to Coruisk via one of the wildest corries in the Cuillins.
With no need now to hurry, I enjoyed picking my way down through fields of massive tumbled rocks, some weighing hundreds of tons. An awe-inspiring place, huge slabs of rock rising into cloud and a recent rockfall which had casually scattered fresh house-size blocks down the mountainside.
Back at the tent I cooked tea sealed from the rain and midges. I could either spend the rest of the evening sitting inside, or go for a paddle. I chose the latter option. It took just five minutes to cross the end of Loch Scavaig, passing the moored lochs with their owners ensconced in comfy cabins sipping G&Ts, to land at the mouth of the Scavaig River.
Harder work was to haul the boat a quarter of a mile upstream – a bit more plastic scratched off the bottom – but worth the effort to launch again into a still Loch Coruisk.
So, in the late evening, with no wind and the raindrops bouncing off the loch, I made my way up the grey sheet of water beneath great slabs of rock, now seamed with little white waterfalls, the only sounds the running water, the rain on my hood and the gentle dip of the paddle.
The far end of Loch Coruisk is quite a remote spot, the experience of being here alone in a kayak in the middle of the loch with the high mountains soaring into the cloud is not one I’ll forget.
I slept well that night, but the morrow was one of those muggy, drizzly days with the mist almost down to sea level. Back at Elgol you wouldn’t even have known the Cuillins were there.