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.