As a young man, I used to go camping around Scotland with my friend, Bill. We used to travel around the perimeter of the country in a clockwise direction, beginning in Glasgow, and then northwards to the top left hand corner of Scotland at Cape Wrath. After that we headed eastwards for John O’Groats and then returned home southwards along the east coast to Edinburgh and England.
I used to take slides with my trusty Voigtländer camera. I was then able to bore people silly on wet Thursday evenings. I recently found all my slides, packed away in a very large box in the attic, but unfortunately, there were a good few which I could not identify. When I got round to doing it, one or two of the slides also suffered during the conversion process into digital images, usually acquiring either an overall blue or purple cast, or, on other occasions, with the image being much darker than it had originally been. Even so. many of these fifty year old slides had a certain value of their own.
Going northwards on the west coast, seeing the extremely steep road at Applecross is an absolute must. Here is a view of it, relatively close to the top. The white dots are sheep……
Not every part of Scotland is hard volcanic rock. This area was mainly limestone which, around 10,000 B.C., enabled the water from the melting ice cap to carve out hundreds of caverns and tunnels underneath the slowly moving glacier. When the glaciers had finally departed, any tunnels or caverns might well collapse, leaving this rather bizarre landscape of roof supports……
The mountains in the very north west are not as high as they are further south around Ben Nevis or further east in the Cairngorms. Once again, the pattern is a landscape scrubbed clean by vast sheets of ice with just a few moderate mountains sprinkled on it…….
I have wondered for a number of years, given the number of people who leave the Highlands for the big cities, how many of these peaks will have had their names forgotten in ten or twenty years’ time. These are quite a lot of mountains in this area. Who will live near them to remember their names? And who will still speak Gaelic to pronounce those names?
The language still spoken by many in the Highlands belongs to the Celtic family of languages and is called Gaelic, pronounced “G-A-L-L-I-C” and certainly not “G-A-R-L-I-C”.
Another spectacular mountain I liked a lot was Suilven, the so-called “Sugar Loaf Mountain”…..
Here it is from a rather spectacular angle. Just look how many cars are filling the one street of the village. Climbers must have been queuing to attempt the summit, a bit like Everest nowadays….
Let’s finish with one or two of the more famous landmarks in this region of Scotland. First of all, here is the entrance and some of the interior of Smoo Cave, near Durness. The cave itself is simply gigantic, a fine example of how well limestone can dissolve in glacial water. Nowadays the cave is lit up with a selection of coloured floodlights. When I was there, you needed to have brought your own torch……
Perhaps the second most famous mountain in this area is Stac Polliaidh (pronounced “Stac polly”). It is a fantastic viewpoint over the rest of the mountains in the region. It has this rather dishevelled look to it, as if it were the first ever Punk Mountain. Stac Pollaidh is not particularly high but it can be dangerous if you aren’t careful. There are paths to the top, but the are all very steep and they give you a excellent chance of falling to your death…..
Right in the very, very north west corner of Scotland the countryside can be extremely unexpected. It has many enormous sand dunes and I wish I had taken more photographs of them. Here’s the only one I could find…..
My last slide for today shows the view at sunset from the north of the Isle of Skye, looking beyond the Outer Hebrides towards the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and Canada.
It is worth pointing out that this particular slide did did not acquire that reddish-pink cast during some conversion course on the computer. This was 1975, one of the hottest, driest and best summers of the late twentieth century,