Knit Knot makes choosing our next holiday adventure very simple. We get out the map of places we have collections from and pick somewhere we’ve never been. This year as a [Scottish] friend pointed out to us north of the border was looking a wee bit forgotten. So off we flew.
Flying from Bristol into Inverness we picked up our hire car and drove to the coast.
We made Ullapool our base for the first week staying just on the edge of Loch Broom. It’s on the North Coast 500, Scotland’s answer to Route 66 and it’s certainly popular with all groups of adventurers.
Ullapool had everything we could possibly wish for. Excellent bookshop, outdoor gear shop, for fresh fish you had to go to the butchers and an excellent gelato shop that traded with an honesty box – and buoy their gelato was good. And we very much enjoyed the FBI – Ferry Boat Inn on a couple of occasions - no Scottish shanty singing though, perhaps we didn’t stay late enough!
Prior to the discovery of the free wi-fi at the Tourist Information and access to our beloved Weather Pro we headed off to Camas Beag and Camas Mor, beaches that were recommended to us as the place where everything washes-up and a high level of treasure was to be had. This was our only experience of Scottish rain [in week one] and also when we discovered that our waterproof clothing was just clothing. We did make it to the beach and were a little shocked at what we found. It certainly was the beach that everything washed-up on, and had washed-up on for many moons. We cleared what we could carry and headed back to the car, on what seemed like a much longer walk back thanks to the torrential rain.
We had already bagged a beach clean on the first day of our arrival, keen to explore and collect some treasures [and some rubbish]. We hesitated a little when referring to edge of Loch Broom as a beach but it was a tidal sea loch and therefore technically a beach. It's a beach we could happily lose hours on but not a sandy beach in the traditional sense.
It has always been a curious thing that there are many #2MinuteBeachClean boards in England, Wales and Ireland but none yet to appear in Scotland. We’ve only had a tiny snapshot of North West Scotland but there is certainly the need for the barefoot army. This week we only visited a couple of beaches, both of which were long walks from the car but there are many stretches of easily accessed pebble and sand loch edges that could do with a little clean every now and then. And then we were then heartened to see a Beach Clean poster organised by the Marine Conservation Society. We couldn’t make the date as we were moving onto our second weeks accommodation but we did manage two cleans prior to this date so we did our best to help.
The second beach we visited couldn’t have been more of a contrast to the first. The sun was shining, the sky was blue and we were heading to one of the most remote and beautiful beaches in Scotland – Sandwood Bay. Sandwood itself covers 4,703 hectares of wild and crofted land just a few miles from Cape Wrath on the north-west tip of Scotland. There is a four-mile path to the Bay and through the most beautiful landscape and the destination was worth every step. The John Muir Trust work to defend wild land, rewild habitats and encourage people of all ages and backgrounds to connect with wild places – isn’t it brilliant that organisations like this exist? To defend existing wildness and rewild other places. We made certain that we took some rubbish home [although it took way longer than two minutes to find some, which was a joy itself] and left nothing behind other than our footprints.
It’s hard to say what was the highlight this week, but sailing out to the Summer Isles with Shearwater Cruises and coming across a huge pod of common dolphins has got to be up there. Such playful and magical creatures that took such obvious joy in leaping alongside our boat. We like to think of it as a truly wonderful thank you from them for all our beach clean efforts, certainly encouragement to keep them up and a positive reminder as to why we all do it.