North-western Scotland days 1-3

So, last week we had our family holiday up in Scotland, near Ullapool. To get a scale of how far north it is, it's about 6-7 hours driving north of Carlisle!

So we loaded the landrover up and headed north at about 10 on saturday. We got there at about 5 and met the James family who were staying with us that week who are family friends and Joanna and Freddie Graham-Campbell and Mark Forster. Freddie and Mark are friends of Tobys from school and Joanna is Freddie's mum and a friend of my mum and dads.

The first day was a simple day fishing on Loch Damph and the Clar lochs and teaching the James' how to fish. Everyone caught at least one trout (except me :( ) and we went home to roast chicken.

On the 2nd day we went for a walk up a mountain called Cul Mor, which is about 800m and was a great 4-5 hour walk and fairly easy. We parked opposite Knockan crag (a geological site) and walked up a good path, the path kinda ran out but it was easy to pick a way up to the summit by following the shoulder up, whilst the 'kids' went for the "north face" option and went straight up the steepest face which involved a nice bit of scrambling. Once up on the top we had great views of the surrounding landscape. This area of Scotland is known of Assynt, and the mountains just rise up out of the land like great monsters and it is so impressive. I think a lot of people would be surprised by the landscape up there and how quiet ad beautiful it is. It is awe inspiring. We didn't stay too long at the top as the wind had dropped and the midges had come out! If you have not encountered midges then you are lucky! They are horrible little creatures. Similar to mosquitoes, but much smaller and worse as they swarm around you and bite everything in site. So we made our way onto the next top and down the mountain. On the way down it started raining, but it wasn't long to the car and then it stopped. On the way back down the valley it started raining again, which, surprisingly we were pleased about! It meant that the rivers would rise, stir the fish up and improve our chance of catching them.

Thanks to the rain the previous day, we went fishing up on the Rappach today which is one of the most remote salmon rivers in Scotland. It is either 1.5 hours walk across bogland in wellies to the top of it or and hour in the landrover on a rough track and a 20 minute walk to the bottom of it. We took the walking option. The day started off couldy with little wind (bad for midges) but ended up warm and sunny. It was a lovely days fishing in amazing scenery, we saw fish and had some bites, but non were pulled out of the river unfortunately. We got back to the house at about 7 and so didn't end up eating till about 10 as we were having roast beef, but it was worth it :)