Episode 20

Episode 20
Some blue sky and sunshine finally arrived as we came to the small village of Gairloch on the loch of the same name. Here at the small jetty we saw a cruise boat docked. It was called the Hebridean Princess and was about the same size as the Polar Pioneer. While we were there a few of the passengers got off and went for a walk around the village.
This is a very pretty village with the calm loch waters and many small islands. The mainly white painted houses were spread over a long way close to the shore. It probably looked even better than normal to us as there was blue sky and sunshine after so much wet weather.
A short way further on we came to another small village called Poolewe, on Loch Ewe. This area was a high security Naval area during WW11 when it was used as the base for the sending of conveys that went through the Barents Sea to Murmansk and Archangel in Russia carrying vital supplies to the besieged Russians. Nineteen conveys left from here:
It is a well sheltered deep water loch and at times was filled with ships. It was bombed by the Germans on at least one occasion but the bombs missed the 2 ships that were in harbour at the time. A submarine net was places across the entrance to the harbour and two launches stood by to open it when boats needed to pass in or out. In recent times an unexploded bomb has been found on the sea floor. Its still there:
All around the shore most of the old gun encampments and watch towers can still be seen. It was said to be a lonely life, a posting here, for those that came from the city as the villages here were really tiny. The winters were bitterly cold and it wasn’t unusual for the men to have to break the ice on a stream to get water to have a shave. I also read that one fellow said, and I quote “after 6 months you started talking to yourself, after 1 year you started talking to the sheep, after 18 months the sheep started talking to you.
It was a Sunday when we drove around this part of the country and it was just as well we hadn’t needed any supplies or fuel as we didn’t see one shop or fuel place open. This is the only Sunday we have found absolutely everything closed. There were plenty of people out fishing:
We came to the Corriehalloch Gorge. Its only a small gorge and you don’t even realize its there until you walk down the path through the waste ground that is cleared pine forest then suddenly the ground opens up in front of you and a 30m deep chasm is between you and the other side. Pine trees and oak trees cling precariously to the vertical grey, moss and fern covered rocky sides of the gorge and a stream boosted by recent rain tumbles over a waterfall then rushes off towards the sea. A small suspension bridge spans the gorge directly over the top of the waterfall, it was built in the 1880’s, and a cantilevered observation platform juts out over the chasm further downstream offering a great view of the falls and the bridge. Overhead we watched some birds of prey, don’t know what, perhaps buzzards, as they rode an air current circling higher and higher eventually disappearing into the wreaths of misty cloud that were forming overhead. There were 3 of them:
There was a great lot of pine forest around this area, some big area had been cleared, don’t know if they replant of let the self sewn ones come up, but we saw no sign of young trees emerging.
We passed a big dam that was very low and remembered that someone had told us that the summer and spring had been fairly dry, pity it hadn’t lasted into October. The dam was down a good 15m. I expected to see a hydro station below it but there wasn’t one. We had seen one earlier in the day on a much smaller dam, loch Kerry.
We circled back into Wester Ross and visited the little town on Ploctown; this is where the TV series Hamish Macbeth was filmed in the early 90’s. It’s much bigger than it first appears and is said to be ‘postcard pretty’ but it was raining heaving again when we arrived so it looked merely dreary. We stayed the night in the area and had a look at it again the next morning when there was some blue sky and sunshine about. It certainly looked much better with all the prettily painted houses clustered about the shore and plenty of colourful little boats bobbing on the water in the bay.
We took the bridges and crossed back to the Isle of Skye and went down to a place I had found marked on the map as ‘Otter Haven’; it seemed from the name that it might be a place to see some otters. A drive down a dead-end road and a walk of a mere kilometre brought us to a specially constructed hide from which to view any wildlife that cared to show itself: Some information charts were pinned to the walls showing all sorts of creatures that we might see both in the sea and on land. There was also a visitor’s book for people to fill out and include what they saw. Of those that had written in the book, not many of them had seen otters. The last person to write had been two days ago.
We settled down to watch, each with a pair of binoculars. Almost immediately David thought he spotted one, but if he did it vanished very quickly. For around two hours we sat there and scanned the water till our eyes felt like sandpaper from looking through the binoculars. We saw a lovely grey heron, a curlew, black backed gulls, shags, cormorants and a whole range of other birds, but no otters, nor seals for that matter. Some of the visitors had seen seals and otters. Several showers passed over while we watched, the tide went out quite a way and left the little lighthouse immediately below the hide high and dry, but not an otter did we see.
The only thing that gave me some satisfaction about the whole exercise was that we finally found out what sort of trees we’d seen that looked like pines but turned yellow and lost their needles. I had suggested a larch but wasn’t sure, but in the hide we saw some information on the trees and learnt that I had been right, it was a larch but it’s a hybrid; a cross between the European and Japanese larch. They are often planted in clusters in amongst the pine forests so that you get the effect of a deep green of the pine then this large area of bright gold on a hillside or in a gully that is the larch.
Drove around the Sleat peninsula and saw a couple more piles of rock that were once castles. One had a couple of walls still standing and two brick archways but not much more. Then we took the ferry from Armadale to Mailaig back on the mainland. This is a bigger town than I was expecting, and another one that is clustered around the shore of the bay and backed by high hills all covered in the golds and russets of autumn foliage. Continuing in a southerly direction for a while we followed the railway line and admired the lovely old stone arched viaducts and bridges along the line. One was small foot bridge over the line, some were one or two arch bridges over streams or a road and one had several arches.
In a glen we saw 5 beech trees that are all that is left of 7 that were planted to honour 7 prominent people who assisted the Bonny Prince in 1745/46. Two have been damaged in the bad storms of 1988 so 7 new ones have been planted but are still only small. Here too we saw an old lime kiln where the farmers used to burn the limestone to make fertilizer for the fields. Much of the old woodland all around these parts were destroyed to make charcoal for smelting iron or burning lime, it’s the only thing that will burn hot enough for such things.
We came to several more places where otters were supposed to live and spent much more time searching beaches and in another hide but still have not seen one, and now we will be out of their habitat from here onwards.
Now we were heading up through the central part of Scotland following a series of lochs and rivers that cut the country in half from North Sea coast to Atlantic coast. Soon we came to the start of the Caledonian Canal at its southern end. Here a series of 9 lochs lifts the level from that of the sea loch to that of the canal that passes through this lower end of the Glen. This place is called Neptunes Staircase. There are also 2 swing bridges here, one for the road the other for the railway line.
The Caledonian Canal was designed by Thomas Telford at the beginning of the 19th Century. It was completed in 1822 by which time many of the ships then in use were too big to pass through the canal. It is 96.4K’s (60miles) long, of which 35.6k’s (22miles) is man made canals. There are 29 lochs and 10 swing bridges. We crossed at least 3 of those swing bridges as we made our way northward toward Inverness at the northern end of the Canal and Glen Ness.
A monument to the Commandos was something we came across along the way. These elite forces were formed in 1940 made up of volunteers from all the services of the British and Allied forces. They were trained in the Highlands around this area then sent to undertake special assignments in all theatres of the War. The most noticeable part of their uniform was their Green Beret.
Just off the present road there is an old suspension bridge not used any more. It’s called the ‘Bridge of Oich’ and crosses the river of the same name. Opened in 1854 after its predecessor got washed away in a flood it is of a special design that even if it wasn’t joined in the middle neither side should fall down, its called ‘double cantilever’ and was designed by one James Dredge.
Then we came to Loch Ness: This famous loch is 38k’s long and up to 230m deep. Apart from the famous monster that nobody ever gets a good look at it is also a favourite place for seals and ospreys that come to feed off the trout and salmon. Along the shore there are a few small villages with plenty of hotels and souvenir shops trading of “Nessy’s popularity. Apparently one of the first recorded sightings of Nessy was by St Columba in the 6th Century, so poor old Nessy is getting a bit long in the tooth so to speak. Definitely didn’t put in any appearance for us.
While in Inverness I just happened to be passing the town hall when I was stopped by security and asked to wait a minute before passing as someone ‘important’ was about to come out and get into a car. It turned out to be Princess Ann. Of course I didn’t have the camera with me.
Inverness is rather a nice place. It has some lovely old 19th century buildings in the city centre and along facing the river bank. There is a narrow strip of parkland either side of the river and all is overlooked by the Castle atop the hill built of pink sandstone and recently sandblasted so that it really shows the colour well. It is now the Inverness Sheriff Court House. There was first a fort on this site in the 12th century, then a castle that was destroyed just after Bonny Prince Charleys defeat at Culloden in 1746; this present castle dates from 1834. Culloden is just outside of Inverness.
Went looking for a place called Black Rock Gorge; managed to find a caravan park of the same name but couldn’t find the gorge so we gave up and headed on north again. A couple of caves along the coast were something else we thought of going to see but the rain was tipping down still and all the tracks are just so waterlogged that we gave the idea a miss and kept on. Kept looking for signs to some of the ruins that were marked on the map, several castles and brochs, but mostly they were unmarked so we missed them.
In the little town of Dornoch on the north shore of the firth with the same name we stopped to have a look at the Cathedral and found a few other interesting sites too. As cathedrals go this is a vey small one built on the cruciform style.
Gilbert de Moravia was bishop of Caithness in 1222 when he decided to move his diocese from Halkirk to Dornoch and to build a cathedral there on the site of a very early Christian church. The Irish priest Finnibar, he became St Bar, had built a church here in the 6th century, this is the same St Bar that had founded the little church ruin we had visited on the island of Barra. Gilbert financed the building of this cathedral himself and used local stone and glass in the building. It was consecrated in the year 1239. More modern stained glass windows have replaced older ones and the organ is from the 18th century though it was completely rebuilt a few years ago.
In the tipping rain we walked around the small town, the bishop’s palace across the road from the cathedral is now a hotel and there is a museum nearby too but it wasn’t open. A short walk to the outskirts of the town and we found the ‘witches stone’; it marks the site of the last ‘burning at the stake’ of a witch in Scotland in 1772. We were a day late in find this, a day after Halloween.
Also found the old town well that became so polluted with seeping sewerage that cholera became common. It was in the late 19th century that reticulated water from a loch in the hills brought clean fresh water into the town. One area is called Littletown. This is where many of the families came to live after the big land clearances of the late 18th and early part of the 19th century. They came here and built tiny sod houses with turf roofs, but later when things improved many replaced them with small stone houses and several can still be seen around here.
When we visited the tourist info office here I asked the girl what people did for a living in this area. It is a much better agricultural area than most other parts of the highlands with plenty of rich green pastures and great stacks of plastic wrapped silage rolls. It’s not as mountainous here, more rolling farmland with open fields and patches of woodland. The girl told me that farming and tourism are the main things along with some fishing. In the summer it gets very busy with tourists but for about 6 months it’s very quiet, from now till Easter there is only the odd straggler like us. In the high mountains there are some winter sports areas but not around here.
Some way further north we passed the heap of rocks that was Skelbo castle, nothing much to look at there, then later we came upon the more impressive Dunrobin castle. Although not a really pretty castle from the outside it does boast 189 lavishly furnished rooms and lovely gardens and a falconry. A drive of 500 metres through a beech wood dressed in the bright gold leaves of autumn brought us to the castle. However, it was closed for the season and the falconry master was off on holiday too. Of all those rooms only 17 are open to the public on a tour. This is the home of the Duke of Sutherland, at one time the biggest landowner in Europe with 1.3 million acres of land. It was one of the dukes that ordered much of the clearing of the crofters in this area and there are a few other places like Littletown where they settled. A great many migrated to America and Canada back in the 18th century then in the later clearances of the 19th century many went to Australia and New Zealand and well as the US and Canada. They were moved off the land owned by the big landlords so more sheep and cattle could be grazed and to provide better hunting opportunities for guests to hunt deer and pheasant or fish for salmon and trout.
There were some good cairns and more standing stones to see but they all involved walking over very soggy ground in pouring rain for a mile or so and we didn’t really feel that we needed to do that so we gave them a miss. Same thing happened too when we went to see where the old gold mine used to be at Baile de Or. This is 8 miles inland from Helmsdale and is where some Scott’s man who had returned from the Australian gold fields found gold in 1869. Not much gold was ever found here but fossickers still try their hand at panning in the stream every summer and some manage to find just a little.
At Wick we went in search of the castle and found just another pile of stones quite near the shore. The shore here is a rock shelf that stretches out 50 metres or more to where the waves bash themselves against it and throw up large plumes of spray. This is a very grey and dismal looking North Sea.
© Lynette Regan 1st November 2007