Exploring the Beauty of Wester Ross, Scotland
On the white wintry shore, it is sunny and raining all at once. This is Wester Ross, where rags of mist hang in crystal-clear air, the sand is made of crushed cowrie shells, and peaks of water shudder in the strait from which a rainbow jags suddenly towards a dazzling sun, only to dissolve like a spectre.
The wide and lonely region of Wester Ross – a loosely defined area encompassing the western parts of Ross and Cromarty in Scotland’s Northwest Highlands – is frequently like this: transcendent. Many assume it’s a mere portal to the Isle of Skye, but what a vast picture Wester Ross evokes. Mountains of sandstone (many of them Munros: Scottish peaks above 3,000 feet) topple into screes of quartzite, ranges broadening until the sea disappears from view. Primeval Caledonian pine forests at Beinn Eighe, called Wood of the Grey Slope, as if out of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. Lambent coral beaches south of Applecross towards Toscaig, with silent sands rippling into hunks of peat. All weathers and terrains collide in Wester Ross, especially along the fjord-like coastline.
But this particular shore – a little rocky archipelago of pale islets at Sandaig, south of the village of Glenelg on the Sound of Sleat – has a cartoonish fantasy beauty that matches my heightened mood when I eventually get there. It’s something of a pilgrimage for me to see where the naturalist Gavin Maxwell resided with his otters, including Mijbil, the only living specimen of a previously unknown subspecies of Asian otter, which he brought from Iraq.
I’d been confused in a forest on the way (there’s no obvious sign to Sandaig – visitors need a map) and then pushed through brambles, down a path dug into a cliff, to finally reach the place that Maxwell named Camusfearna. Now just a cairn marks the position of his writing desk; the building burned down in 1968. A family of pipits weave in and out of some rocks closer to shore, pressing their breasts against the wind and allowing the thermals to buffet them, as though playing. It smells thickly of resinous clay, wet animals, and blackberries. Wading across a burn close to the shore that’s running so loudly and is so swollen with rain that my ears ring, I eventually fall onto the shell-strewn archipelago, the reeds of the field giving way to seaweed lying in great masses, hefty as ferry rope and the colour of mustard. Silver-seamed stones stud the sand, and I’m amazed – and moved – to stumble over the rusted remains of the iron winch of Maxwell’s boat, Polar Star, surrounded by daisies.
In Wester Ross, you feel utterly the presence of things you often cannot see. Mountains can be heavily occluded by a pinky-white vapour, and yet there is a sense of their looming rawness, the sun suddenly streaking through to unveil vast pleats and Ice Age folds in rock. Highland light plays tricks. I walk one day from the Kintail Outdoor Centre bunkhouse a few miles in the direction of the Five Sisters of Kintail massif, along a route in a valley once used for taking cattle to market from the coast. I have the uncanny sense of walking towards and yet never quite getting closer to Sgurr na Mòraich and Ben Attow. In the shadow, the mountains look strokably soft and tawny as felt, turning parrot-green in sudden bright sun, the patterns down the slopes convulsing in twists, mesmerising, but eternally at a distance. When I stop for a rest on the banks of the Croe, a small spate river that flows benignly to the sea at Morvich, a chain of deep, still, and completely clear pools banked in flowered moss look ideal for swimming, but I just sit instead and watch a black cat weave through a field and the remains of an old croft.
Wester Ross – A Remote Haven
Wester Ross has one of the lowest population densities in Europe. There are few settlements but the occasional, remarkable new build, such as the larch-and-glass 57 Nord, sitting above the confluence of three sea lochs – Loch Duich, Loch Long, and Loch Alsh – a tidal island one way, alpine forests another, the Five Sisters beyond. A few yachts sway before the Iron Age fort of Dun Totaig, hidden among the trees directly over the water. Below is the castle of Eilean Donan, seen in the opening moments of the film Highlander. Glowing through the dusk, the lights of the castle flicker off at midnight and then comes the recurrent amazing spectacle of the Wester Ross stars, hanging so brightly sometimes that everything is totally transfigured.
It’s important to communicate just how cut off, how remote, this part of Scotland was – and, to some extent, remains. The few highways in Wester Ross – the A832 and the A896 – are storybook stuff. However, life moves more intentionally here. I knew a crofter, old Iain – the last man to swim his cattle across to the little islets off the coast for winter grazing – who once told me that in the 1960s he would cycle from his home on Skye through Wester Ross, some 200 miles, to visit his family in Glasgow. Buses were few; needs must. The physical strength that journey took – on a heavy old bike, sleeping in fields – is truly something. But when I pointed it out one day round his kitchen table, he just shrugged, a button dangling off his shirt, as he scratched the head of his border collie Pip.
Where to Stay in Wester Ross
57 Nord’s Hill House
This might be the most covetable house in northwest Scotland. Not just for the startling view of massif and loch, but for the angle at which it sits on its hill. The glass windows offer a profound experience of the region’s beauty and history, framed and shifting in great waves of rain. Every texture of the interior tells its own subtle story, including ceramics by Edinburgh-based artist Borja Moronta and meadow-like textiles by Scottish weavers.
The Glenelg Inn
More than worth the peninsula drive out to it, the Glenelg is a place where it feels permanently like dusk; the fire has just been lit, and visitors burst through the doors, perhaps wrecked by a storm. An ageing whippet by the fireplace set an immediately mellow tone, and yet this is a place of high spirits, with the best pub food this side of the Applecross Inn.
The Torridon
This hotel was built in 1887 as a shooting lodge for the Earl of Lovelace and has since become a beloved destination. The Torridon offers a grand yet cozy atmosphere, and many guests stay parked in The Whisky Bar with its extensive collection of malts.
