Feature
Fringe Benefits - A Wild West Special
This edition we introduce the delights of parts of the west coast of Scotland through the eyes of three of Scotland’s commensurate hill ‘gangrels’. Richard Gilbert shares his passion for the far north with the history of his family’s exploits, John Allen reminisces on his Corbetteering in the wild lands west of Fort William and Irvine Butterfield visits the island of Jura looking for a whirlpool.
The Incomparable North-West
By Richard Gilbert
Photos by the Author
“I suppose I have my father to thank for my life long love of the Highlands”
We lived in London’s suburbia in the immediate postwar years and, with petrol rationing and only a fortnight’s holiday a year, travelling north required a single-minded effort. But, by scrounging petrol coupons and piling the roof rack of the old Talbot with fuel cans, my father managed to take the family to the Highlands every year.
When I was 15 my brothers and I started hitchhiking to Scotland in the school holidays. My father would drive us to Hatfield in the evening to thumb the convoys of lorries grinding north up the A1. Our two best hitches were across to the Cuillin in Dame Flora MacLeod of Macleod’s Rolls Royce and a non-stop lift from Perth to London in a Staples mattress lorry. Undoubtedly the worst was with a tar macadam-laying machine crawling at 5mph from Linlithgow to Falkirk.
Countless hours were spent waiting for ferries at Queensferry, Ballachulish, Strome Ferry, Kyle and Kylescu; crossings which have long since been bridged. Yet the time never dragged with cramped legs to stretch, seals and herons to watch and stones to be skimmed.
I first learned about the far north-west from J. Hubert Walker’s book “On Hills of the North” published in 1948. I drooled over the black and white pictures of Liathach, Quinag and Sandwood Bay.
In the early 1970s my wife and I bought two acres of hillside in Ross-shire high above Loch Broom and built a timber-framed house which we called Shenavall. We were both teachers in North Yorkshire with mouth wateringly long holidays, most of which we spent with our four children at Shenavall.
From the kitchen window we could look east to the Fannichs and the Beinn Dearg Forest, south over the loch to An Teallach and Beinn Ghobhlach and west over Ullapool harbour to the Summer Isles and the distant hills of Harris. With this inspirational background we set about exploring the area.
Luckily the children shared our enthusiasm and there was never a plea for Euro Disney, Butlins or Centre Parc. By the age of 12 they had all traversed Suilven, An Teallach and Liathach as well as the host of delectable, spectacular but easier peaks: Beinn Alligin, Stac Pollaidh, Cul Mor, Cul Beag, Ben More Coigach, Quinag, Ben More Assynt etc.
Conditions varied enormously year by year. We have cut steps on sheets of ice on An Teallach in May, yet in another year (1981), in a late March heatwave, only a few snow pockets were left in Coire an Lochain and we battled through smoke on Sail Liath as the estate workers burnt the heather.
The mysterious Summer Isles attracted us like a magnet and one year we persuaded the skipper of an Ullapool prawner to take us to Priest Island (before it became a bird reserve) where we camped for a week before being taken off in a Force 8 gale. By popular demand we repeated this a year later but on Tanera Beag. Sitting outside the tents above a shingle beach with the smoke from a driftwood fire curling into the still air, while a fiery sky lingers on the western horizon and fulmars glide past the cliffs, provided enduring memories.
There is no doubt that my fascination with the Summer Isles was stimulated by Frank Fraser Darling’s emotive books “Island Years” and “Island Farm”. These books, together with his classic “The Highlands and Islands”, written with J.Morton Boyd for the Collins New Naturalist series, shows Fraser Darling to be one of the great pioneering naturalists of the twentieth century.
Other popular places for picnics and overnight camps were Gruinard Bay, with its safe shallow waters for swimming and fishing for mackerel off the tidal islands, and Sandwood Bay just south of Cape Wrath. Sandwood Bay was always awe-inspiring, but never more so than on a day of storm when the boom of the breakers could be heard from miles away. When the children were very small we camped in rough weather at the bay on a spit of land beside the lagoon, and woke up to find the sea had breached the dunes and had surrounded us with several feet of water. Yet on a day of high summer it is bliss to sit on a bleached driftwood log on the vast expanse of sand and watch gannets diving into the waves for fish.
During scores of visits to Sandwood Bay it has been remarkable to see how the contours of the bay change year by year as thousands of tons of sand are shifted by the winter gales. One year a WW2 Spitfire emerged from the sand only to be resubmerged a week later. No wonder there is the legend of a wrecked galleon from the Spanish Armada somewhere in the bay.
When the weather is too bad for the mountains there are plenty of alternative activities. Exploring the bone caves of Allt nan Uamh and the caverns of the Traligill river with torches was popular, as were trips to Handa Island in early summer to marvel at the thousands of nesting puffins, guillemots and razor bills on the Great Stack.. A varied coastal walk follows the cliffs round the Rubha Coigeach peninsula from Reiff to Achnahaird where, on one notable day, we saw three species of diver: red throated, black throated and great northern.
There is one mountain in the north-west which is particularly elusive and inaccessible. This is Foinaven which is notorious for its cap of clinging cloud. However, on a rare clear day, it makes an enticing objective. The long walk in over blanket bog is rewarded by a complex system of ridges, corries and plateaus of shattered sparkling quartzite, unique to the Highlands. Foinaven misses Munro status by a whisker and you are likely to be able to enjoy perfect peace and solitude although Poucher says, “To sit alone on its crest and listen to the falling of its disintegrated quartzite blocks is one of the most eerie experiences in Britain”.
Richard Gilbert has been climbing for over 50 years. He was President of Oxford University Mountaineering Club in 1961 and ten years later became the 101st Munroist. He was a chemistry teacher in North Yorkshire for 30 years and ran a mountaineering and expeditions club for the boys; in 1977 he was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowship for leading the first ever school expedition to the Himalayas where they climbed Kolahoi.
He has written eleven books including the series Big Walks, Classic Walks and Wild Walks, 200 Challenging Walks, Lonely Hills and Wilderness Trailsand the award winning Exploring the Far North West of Scotland. For 16 years he wrote a regular monthly column for High magazine.
He is a member of the Climbers Club and the Alpine Club.
See the Book Reviews page for a review of 200 Challenging Walks.
