The birds distract me

While I sit here wondering how to begin recording all that happened last week I’m distracted by the most beautiful thing fluttering about in a Scots pine. It’s a great tit – yellow, blue, black and white all at once – and there it is again! Actually it’s a blue tit, not a great tit, as my RSPB pocket guide to British Birds shows. The pocket guide also says, ‘It’s a very lucky person who sees a golden eagle well at close range.’ Well, I saw a golden eagle very well, at close range, on the Isle of Skye. We were on our way to Kilt Rock, just past the Old Man of Storr, when Tony spotted it flying along a line of tree-tops. It was unmistakably a golden eagle by its size and coloration, and we viewed it perfectly through the bins till it took off with slow, powerful wingbeats before gliding out of sight. I was also lucky to see the lovely lapwing, visiting for the summer near a Celtic graveyard close to where we wild-camped on the sea loch on Skye. The lapwing has such an exquisite crest and coloration that I thought it ought to have a qualifying name like the African lapwings do. But just a plain-named lapwing it was, and fairly common in Scotland. Then there was the redshank, with its bright red legs and red bill fading to black, on a kind of estuary in Scourie where we saw a very bonnie sundown. The oystercatchers are as striking as the African ones are and their call comfortingly familiar. My best sighting of them was on the salmon-pink sand of beautiful Applecross beach. Oh and I hadn’t seen ptarmigan before, high up on a Corbett in Torridon being snowed on without complaint. Then there was Handa Island… where thousands and thousands of fulmars, guillemots and razorbills nest on magnificent sea stacks and cliffs 100 metres high. There were great skuas too and although the puffins hadn’t arrived yet, the eider ducks were there, protected from eiderdown fate. And did I mention the red-breasted mergansers at Lochinver, the ringed plovers at Achnahaird, the curlew and sandpipers near Achiltibuie, the wheatears in summer plumage at Ardveck Castle? I’ll stop. I still haven’t started on last week’s activities.

There are no signs to Camusfearnà

Even though there no signs to the beach where Ring of Bright Water author Gavin Maxwell lived and wrote the classic account of his life with otters, there’s a path you do just seem to find when you want to go there. Maxwell was quite a man. His biographer Douglas Botting described him as an aristocrat, adventurer, naturalist and conservationist, secret agent, shark hunter, racing driver, poet, painter and social renegade; also a most remarkable Scotsman and one of the most popular authors of wildlife books of the 20th century. His house was destroyed in 1968 by fire, which also killed his favourite otter, Edal. A year later Maxwell died too, but a curious atmosphere remains on the beach in his place. He disguised the identity of this pristine piece of coast in Ring of Bright Water by calling it Camusfearnà, yet Sandaig can be found on the map, and that’s where Camusfearnà is. You walk down through woods and then cross a burn by rope-bridge before you’re there, greeted by a memorial stone and a cairn in place of Maxwell’s house. It’s beautiful on this shore of the Sound of Sleat. We swam in the cobalt-blue water – dipping into it seemed the vital thing to do in such a magical place – and I imagined the otters Maxwell had spent his time with. Perhaps not so incidentally, there’s a wonderful otter hide some miles and a short ferry crossing away on the Isle of Skye, at Kylerhea, which also lies on the Sound of Sleat. From there we sat and watched seals and gulls fishing in the high-tide current before being ferried to the quaint little village of Glenelg just a few miles from Camusfearnà. We didn’t see otters at all that day but, as one does with the Ring of Bright Water otters, imagining them is almost enough.

Over the sea to Skye

Good weather forecasts call for spontaneity so, on the spur of the moment, we set off for the Isle of Skye and its Glenbrittle Hostel, which lies at the base of the Black Cuillin mountain range we wanted to climb. The walk from Glenbrittle beach started out easy, but by the time we reached Corrie Lagan the track disappeared into snow and Tony lead on up a steep slope of it. Using ice axes we reached a ridge leading towards Sgurr Mhic Choinnich, which is a wee bit exposed in places. We couldn’t make the summit as there was ice in the Great Stone Shoot, but from the ridge we could see the conspicuous Inaccessible Pinnacle in perfect view, as well as all the other Cuillin peaks and the Inner Hebridean isles of Rhum, Eigg and Canna. Getting to the base of In Pinn was spectacular, with more snow-gully climbing that I’ve got quite used to now. We didn’t climb the pinnacle itself but a guy who we met on the summit of Sgurr Dearg did, in just 10 minutes. We couldn’t decide what to climb the following day, there was so much choice, so we nipped into Portree for a bit of charcoal-coat-and-chartreuse-jacket shopping and sweet chai at Café Arriba, and then settled on the ascent of Blaven, which called for the most exhilarating manouevres yet. I couldn’t see how we could possibly get down from this munro without tracing our steps until Tony kicked steps into a vertical wall of snow beneath us. That brought us to another slope we had to ascend in a similar way before reaching the summit of Blaven. On top we met a bare-legged artist sketching the Cuillin ridge, which we’d seen from the other side the day before. The descent turned out to be straightforward and we chatted all the way down in twilight that the Scots call gloamin. We wild-camped on the shore of a sea loch in view of the peak we’d just climbed, made a fire with drift-wood and only woolly sheep passed us by.

Into the heart of Torridon

Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be climbing mountains in Scotland like I did today. They were just as impressive as the Himalaya and the High Atlas, and there were lochs into the bargain, and nobody around. Tony was my leader as we walked into a corrie with the perfectly still corrie loch Mhic Fhearchair and forbidding peaks all round: Sàil Mhor, Beinn Dearg, Beinn Aillegan, Beinn Eòin, Rhuadh-stac Mór, with Triple Buttress at the head of the loch. All the peaks were covered in snow and we walked up one of them, a munro called Coinneach Mhor on Beinn Eighe, using ice-axes to keep our grip up the steep slope of snow that was actually a waterfall beneath. The sun was burning hot going up, but at the top it snowed soft, hail-like stones like polystyrene balls, which they call nevee. What a thrilling ascent through the snow to the top of my second munro (282 to go!), but I hadn’t anticipated the descent, which was a near vertical slope of snow and scree. Proper concentration on the 75-degree snow traverse became a fast, exhilarating bum-slide and finally a scary skid down the scree slope. That was like being on a conveyer-belt of moving rock, which I was pleased to be a surfer for, but worried that I’d cause an avalanche down on Tony who was below me. Epic and awesome this day was. Seven hours on the trot. I think we’ll bring the Sabbath forward and take a rest day tomorrow.

A white walk up Meall a’ Ghiubhais

I had no idea that a highland cow could be so shaggy. They look like buffalos with the manes of Kalahari lions, and can barely see through their fringes. They also stand defiant in the path of Land Rovers, as Tony and I discovered when we came across them on a single track leading down to beautiful Slaggan Bay. It’s a secret little beach that the Queen and her entourage once boated to for a picnic. We made a quick detour to see it after walking the Mellon Udrigle coastal trail through peat-bogs overlooking coves and bays, Hebridean islands and snow-covered peaks. Yesterday we climbed one of the peaks we could see from the peat-bog – Meall a' Ghiubhais it’s called, and we did it calf-deep in snow. It was spectacular to be up there in view of countless high peaks, lochs below. Actually we didn’t even intend climbing it but from the foothills of Beinn Eighe it seemed so inviting. Walking in snow is fabulous and peaceful somehow as you crunch through the still crispness leaving large footprints. We had no water so we ate the snow.

Tony has climbed all the peaks I could see. He’s a palaeaontologist who I hitched a ride with on the Isle of Mull in 2005. We’ve been writing ever since and it’s fun to be visiting his home on a hill in Gairloch in the north-western Highlands at the end of a long single-track road that winds through high mountains, lochs and the odd Scots pine. His home is full of interesting books, climbing equipment, easels, canoes, mountain boots, maps and music. My room overlooks the sea loch and there’s a telescope in it for looking across to the Isle of Skye plus an original 1970s fishtail surfboard, which makes me feel right at home.

A white weekend in Suffolk

It’s not snowing now, but it was! Jo, Lin and I were busy drinking tea in Jo’s 15th-century converted pub cottage (called The Black Eagle) when flakes of snow started floating down from above, outside. We shrieked and shrieked and watched an old lady indifferently walking by while snow settled thicker and thicker on her head until she eventually shook it off like a shaggy Highland cow. When the skies cleared we drove to the pretty beach town of Aldburgh with its colourful buildings and pebbled beach. It dropped to 2.5 degrees and would you know it, it snowed again. This time big flakes came down, covered the pebbles and turned the landscape snow white! We dashed from the car to photograph the spectacle, freezing ourselves, shrieking some more and landing up with out-of-focus photos. The day before was clear and bright and we walked along the Walberswick beach collecting stones with holes in them like beads. The locals call them hag stones. I couldn’t make a proper necklase cos I only found three. The beaches here are pebbled with incredible shapes and colours. We saw black-headed gulls, which are pretty, bought funky black shoes and drank several cups a tay.