Two days, two walks

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Mid-afternoon on Thursday, the cloud broke enough for a few patches of blue to show. We grabbed the day pack and drove to Balmacara Square. From the car park, we walked down through woods of pine and beech, towards Kyle, with the loch on our left, visible from time to time through the trees.

At 7pm in the pub in Dornie, the only Scottish voices to be heard were of the bar staff and one local on a stool at the bar. The room buzzed with conversation in a variety of European languages. We tried the local Plockton Bay ale.

On Friday morning, from the kitchen window, we see four men on the hillside, cutting long grass, raking and lifting it to make stacks for hay.

The sky is grey but there's no rain, so we decide to go walking near Shieldaig, a few miles to the north, in Ross and Cromarty, between Lochs Shieldaig and Torridon. The village was founded in 1800 as a training base for seamen in the Napoleonic Wars.

The walk takes us along a path through birch trees, then in a wide circle round a rocky headland. Behind a solitary cottage, we scramble up a low but steep rockface and look down on the islet of Eilean a'Chaoil. Across open moorland, there's a small white house surrounded by pasture where sheep are grazing. We cross rocky terrain and pass above the bay of Camas an Leim. We have the best of the weather on the walk. Back in the village, as we order tea and scones in the bar, it starts to rain.

We drive the winding, steep route round the rocky coast to Applecross. On our way from there towards Kyle, the road climbs to over 2000 feet. At a viewing point, in blustering wind, we look across a hillside of small stone cairns, down to the Inner Sound and Skye in a mist of rain, then descend steeply through a series of hairpins above Loch Kishorn.

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