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Tales from the Sea and the Hills - 3

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And so, having finished our joint boating odyssey we move on swiftly to week two of our break.

We'd been invited to join a group from Outdoors Magic who had hired a cottage for a week in Ullapool which happened to be the week after our week where we had planned to sail and walk. So on Saturday we drove up there via Glencoe.

On the way north many of the hills were still dusted with snow as this shot taken in Glencoe illustrates:

When we got to Ullapool the weather was lovely and so it remained pretty much all week other than Friday as this video I took on Sunday shows. It's the view up Loch Broom from the harbour road at Ullapool.

Through the week Beth did some serious walking with the rest of the gang1 while I chilled out in Ullapool.

I caught the end of the Ullapool Book Festival, a modest event but still well attended if the chat I saw with AL Kennedy2 was anything to go by.

Ullapool also boasts two books shops, one for new books and a charity shop selling second hand books so I was in both like a shot and came away with my wallet slightly lighter.

We had a couple of outings in the truck, including finding a classic NW Scotland beach at Achnahaird Bay is on the road to Achiltibuie.

And I did do some walking too, despite having fallen over in the street on Monday and bashing both knees. We walked up Stac Pollaidh on Friday. The weather had turned by then and there was one hell of a wind, gusting to around 60mph on the ridge so we didn't attempt either actual summit (the eastern one is pretty easy, the western one, which is higher, is a scramble). But we did have lunch wedged behind rocks on the ridge looking down over the landscape which was most excellent.

Beth took lots of photos of that expedition of which this is a sample:

It doesn't look that big in that photo but it's a fair old climb, especially on dodgy knees.

Anyway a good time was had by all and we had a safe drive home on Saturday.

  1. you can find her photos here in various albums.
  2. As part of her "set" she talked about Californians having rodents inserted where the sun don't shine which I thought was very funny but didn't really work that well with most of the audience who either didn't really follow it or were slightly appalled, or both, but their average age was pretty close to retired.

Tags: Beth, books, walks Written 21/05/09

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