Well off the beaten track in barest Sutherland
ONE of the delights of living in the northern Highlands is the ability to explore places that very few people ever visit. Indeed you can kid yourself you are the first person ever to paddle into some remote sea cave, land on some little island or swim in some Flow Country lochan.
It may well be true nobody other than local keepers or anglers have ever been to some places, which remain unvisited from one year to the next. Once well off the beaten track you can certainly take photographs that have never been taken before, most of the fine photos which grace calendars and picture frames are taken from near the road, or else from viewpoints such as well-known mountain tops.
Loch Meadie, Sutherland, is one of the out-of-the-way spots, a loch some four miles long just north of the narrow road from Altnaharra to Hope Lodge. It’s known to anglers, with several boats on the shore, but otherwise is a long way off the normal tourist trail.
The loch sits amid many square miles of gently rolling deer grass, rush and heather, backed by the higher peaks of Ben Hope, Ben Loyal and Ben Hee. Apart from a few pockets of forestry plantation it’s a treeless, empty landscape, with the autumn roars of rutting stags drifting from hill top to hill top across the vast orange-tinted moors. The loch, though, boasts some half-dozen tiny wooded islands, each a microcosm of the landscape it would once have been, prior to burning and overgrazing of sheep and deer during the past centuries. Does anybody ever visit them, has anyone ever been to them all?
A late-afternoon Bothies Association meeting at the Crask Inn, just south of Altnaharra, gave me an excuse to explore.
The October hills were shrouded in mist, with rain forecast, the morning though was absolutely still with the loch a mirror under grey skies. There were even a few cheeky midges as I unloaded the kayak from the roof of the car and put on my paddling gear. The road was deserted, probably no more than half-a-dozen vehicles would pass all day.
The southern end of the loch is quite wide, but mostly it’s long and narrow with no roads or paths along either shore except for an estate track leading to the far end from the Kyle of Tongue. It would be a lovely paddle through quiet, uninhabited country.
Soon, I reached the first little wooded island. No more than 50 yards across, a bouldery shore, with birch, rowan and juniper and an undershrub of heather, rushes and bog myrtle. Several of the other islands were similar, not taking long to explore. On one or two islands, among the heather, were the small white bells of cowberry, with attendant red berries. Faint paths showed routes taken by otters, while the trees provided rare nesting sites for birds, probably including sparrowhawks and buzzards. Gnarled, twisted trunks and autumn leaves framed views of loch and rolling treeless moors all round. The smell of leaf mould is not one of the more common scents in central Sutherland.
FROM island to island I paddled slowly down the loch. Here was what looked very like the remains of a fortified wall along the southern shore of an island, this place could well have been home for people in the days of the crannogs. The largest island, narrow and perhaps 200 yards long, was different, boasting a thicket of long tangled bracken under the trees which soon curtailed my exploration.
From the last of the wooded islands the loch stretches another two miles north, narrowing at one point to little more than 20 yards. With the weather still dry I landed on the west bank and set off for a little walk up the hill above, the 1400-feet Meadie Ridge which I hadn’t visited for 30 years. Bare, wet slopes of grass and rush with some heather led to a stony top with wide views over the vast orange-yellow emptiness under leaden skies. Ben Hope, just to the north, and Ben Loyal, beyond the end of Loch Meadie, were completely hidden by cloud. Faintly in the distance came the roars of the stags. Back down at the boat, the promised rain was just beginning.
A bonus of kayaking or canoeing is that rain makes not one whit of difference, you’re already dressed for the wet! Thoroughly enjoying the quiet solitude of the grey day I paddled on up the loch as far as a little sandy beach at the far end, near where a couple of estate boats sit at the end of the track from Kinloch Lodge.
The wind had now picked up from the south which meant a slightly slower paddle back down the loch, landing on the most westward of the little wooded islands which I’d missed on my trip out. Feeling sleepy – it had been an early start that morning and I’d a touch of a cold (or maybe it was old age) I stretched out in the heather for 10 minutes and dozed off, my kayaking gear keeping me warm and dry, a rare experience to sleep in a tiny wood on an island in the middle of a loch in the remote heart of Sutherland. After that I enjoyed the mile or so back to the car into the wind and choppy waves. But I’d be half-an-hour late for my meeting…
MUCH later, after a fine sociable meal at the Crask, I set off for the long drive home. It’s always quite an experience to drive these empty Sutherland roads late at night. You must keep your speed down and your eyes pealed as deer can run across in front of you at any time.
Round the next blind bend, as like as not, there will be a sheep asleep in the middle of the road. From Altnaharra I took the twisty road along Loch Naver. Drizzly rain was dying out, a half moon gleamed through gaps in the cloud. A fox darted across in front of me. I stopped briefly at Grummore to look at the moon reflected in the water and the dim shape of Klibreck rising into the cloud.
The twisty miles to Bettyhill seemed long. Towards Syre a large herd of deer straddled the road, in the headlights a stag by the road, hinds in front. I stopped to let them cross and the stag roared from just a few yards away, beside the car. Although there were lights from the occasional croft, no other vehicles were moving. I was beginning to wonder if the rest of the world knew something I didn’t when at Melvich I met the first car since leaving the Crask. Where else in Britain can you have 50 miles of roads entirely to yourself?
A part of the world throughly mapped, explored, photographed from space and by satellite – yet there are plenty of places which very few people ever visit or see. How many others have walked across all the little wooded islands of Loch Meadie?