Tuesday 25th - Thursday 27th - Revisiting the north - home

What a mussel!

Tuesday was actually pleasant with some sunshine, the first in a few days which made Ullapool looked as pretty as it ought to.  We packed up and Andy and I took a walk along the loch where we saw the biggest mussel I've ever seen; a huge pink shell attached to rock and seaweed, the creature itself nearly the size of my hand.

Cruiser at Inverness 

Passengers being piped ashore

The loch itself looked inviting - I think it would be lovely to swim here, in warmer weather.  There are tours from here around the Summer Isles too as well as the ferry that runs to Lewis.  Tempting. We went to the ferry port where there was a boat ferrying passengers in from a larger ship, and the passengers were piped ashore by a piper in full regalia.  It added something to our holiday too, to hear that.

 The bus took us along a now fairly familiar road, back through the mountains to Lochinver and then on up to Durness, passing through many of the places we'd walked through.  Back at Durness we pitched up and then went for a walk to the puffin colony which Andy and I hadn't visited before.  By waiting a good while for the birds at sea to decide to come in, we were rewarded by seeing them fly into their burrows.  Other gulls were also there, some feeding chicks that were as large as domestic hens, grey, leggy and demanding.  Back at the tent we again had our usual visitors of various gulls begging for scraps and coming down in a screaming heap on anything that was thrown in their direction.  Alfie never finished his dog food, but they were more than happy to clear it up for him.

Black headed gull

John has visitors

 (An update on Alfie; he had his foot bandaged for a day or so and absolutely thrived on all the sympathy from every passer-by, but a couple of days rest quite restored him and he has been promised a set of little dog-boots for his next trip).

The campsite on the cliff

Guillemots at Durness

On Wednesday we made our final farewell to the lovely Durness beach and took the first post bus (also the school bus) to Lairg for Inverness, calling in for the final time at Kinlochbervie on the way.

The connection was again straightforward and at Inverness, Team Alfie was again broken up as John was able to get a train home on the same day but we had to wait.

Statue of Faith, Hope and Charity, Inverness.

War memorial (WW1), Inverness

Graceful bridge, Inverness

There is a campsite at Inverness - well a camping park - about which less said the better, for they allow dogs for campervans and caravans but not for hikers with tents.  (Bah!!!) We filled up with water and found a nice spot to wild camp out of town on the islands, between the river and the canal, leaving us very well placed to get the first train back home in the morning.



This was also the first time out for the new tent, the Coleman Kraz having come to the end of its life.  Having gone to an outdoors shop and browsing in a general way, I found a good tent at a reasonable price.

New tent - 'Zephyros' by Wild Country/Terra Nova

I was glad that I'd managed to find a couple of chunks of rock at Durness.  The rocks in this part of Scotland are said to be the oldest in the world; thousands of millions of years old, with the oldest piled on top of the more recent, due to seismic activity. It's hard not to develop an interest in geology when you pass by great cliffs of black and white striped rock, the two different rocks heated to the consistency of plasticine and pressed together under great pressure; the black gneiss, the white quartzes and the pink adamantine granites, and then the 'erratics' left on top by passing glaciers.  It's very bleak here, for the soil barely covers the mountains and it's hard to see how anything can grow, and yet it does.  And it's only by spending a bit of time there that you can appreciate it - midges and all.