A walk around the Shieldaig Peninsula

A visit to the far north west of Scotland is an invitation to slow yourself down and reset to a quieter, simpler way of living. It’s a place where the demands on your time and the notifications on your phone can be turned off for a while and you can instead, absorb the silence or watch fishing boats bringing in a catch of prawns in the golden hour whilst listening to the tide gently lapping on rocks that are among the oldest on earth. In the highlands you can find the time and space to think about things, to breathe out, or just do nothing at all, when was the last time you did that? These are rare treasures indeed in our ever busy, scrolling world. “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom” to quote E O Wilson.

Shieldaig village is a small community tucked away nicely on the west coast. Surrounded by the sandstone giants of Torridon its one street looks out over Loch Shieldaig and has a couple of shops, a village hall and a very decent pub and hotel, the Shieldaig Bar & Coastal Kitchen. Just offshore, Shieldaig Island is completely covered in ramrod straight Scot’s pines planted over a hundred years ago. In recent years it’s become home to a pair of sea eagles which we are hoping to see.

We’ve been here before, thirty four years ago we visited this remote spot on a road trip around the Highlands and Islands. I have a favourite picture of Mish from that trip, taken on Skye and when we went back a couple of years ago I couldn’t resist getting a re enactment sitting at the same spot on the old Sligachan bridge.

We’re stopping in the wonderful Shieldaig Camping and Cabins which is run by local man Ruairidh and his wife. The site is situated above the village and we’ve got a lovely spot at the front overlooking the loch and perfect for watching the sun going down in the west.

Our walk around the peninsula starts just outside the campsite. The signpost to ‘An Àird’, in Gaelic as well as English is a reminder that Scotland is most definitely a proud country in its own right and not just an extension of England. The Aird translates as promontory or headland in English which is exactly what it is.

As the path heads away from the village and around the loch the sea eagle nest on Shieldaig Island comes into view. It takes a while for us to locate it against the background of pines but when we find it, sure enough there is a sea eagle in residence.

Now I do carry a camera with me and it does have a reasonable zoom, but to get a decent picture of an eagle from where we are, maybe 500 metres away across the loch would require equipment far in excess, both in cost and quality than my humble LUMIX so we satisfy ourselves with viewing it through our binoculars. I do get a photo, but think small brown blob on top of a pine tree and you’ve got the picture.

The track continues on through sparse birch trees and passes by an old harbour with some ruined cottages. Coming out of the trees we head away from the coast and cross some springy heather with views of Beinn Alligin ahead across upper Loch Torridon.

Before long we arrive at a solid looking white painted building called Bad Callda. It’s the first building we’ve seen on our walk that isn’t a ruin. Sadly there are many ruins and abandoned cottages in the highlands, a legacy of the harshness of the Highland Clearances where Scot’s men and women were forced from their ancestral homes of centuries because sheep were more profitable than people.

The clearances forced many Scot’s to emigrate to the ‘new’ lands of Canada, America, Australia and New Zealand. And today the relatives of those emigrants come to Scotland in their tens of thousands to visit the ‘home country’, drink whisky, buy tartan, play golf at St Andrews and boost the Scottish economy by millions. What goes around comes around as they say.

Bad Callda is a holiday home, certainly a remote one, but there is nobody in so we wander down to the shingle beach in front of the house and sit in the sunshine for a while looking out across Upper Loch Torridon towards Beinn Alligin and listen to the rhythmic sloshing of sea on rocks and the odd seagull squawking overhead.

From Bad Callda we curl around the headland and I leave Mish sat on a bench whilst I venture up to the trig point, something I begin to regret as there’s no path and the ground is rough with gorse and bushes to plough through. Hillwalkers are magnetically drawn to trig points though and soon I am stood next to it at the grand height of 59 metres above sea level.

We stop again at the small harbour of Dornie with more ruins and a couple of holiday cottages and Mish does a bit of beach combing while I try and take some arty pictures.

The return path is slightly more energetic than the outbound track and involves a bit of scrambling over some rock bluffs which have interesting seams of geological time running through them. In two steps we have walked across millions of years of history. 

Later that evening, after a meal in the pub we wander back to the van and watch a west coast sunset. Hints of pink above gradually spread across the sky until clouds and sea are glowing fiery red and orange. The colours then slowly fade to grey and the imperceptible creep of twilight brings another day to a close and all is black and silent.

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