Highland Insider

Lael forest lies around seven miles south of Ullapool and I can recommend it for a walk when you want to indulge in a bit of melancholy. I was there on Saturday, with a steady, soft rain making everything drip and occasional shafts of sunlight bringing the wet rocks and leaves magically to life. Shy daffodils brightened the sides of the paths which were pleasantly mulchy underfoot. 

You’re supposed to go there to enjoy the trees but the star for me was the moss that furred up the old walls and crept up the feet of the nearby trunks. When you’re in that sort of mood, cool green dampness is better than any summer flower border. If it hadn’t been so wet I’d have leaned against that velvety wall and read a bit of Edward Dyer. Sigh…

Summer Isles Foods – “where the food is as beautiful as the scenery” – is leaving Achiltibuie and transferring its salmon smoking and other operations to a factory in Alness. I’ve been buying their products for years and am so disappointed that they are selling out on the small community that built up the brand. Apparently they are expecting to be providing huge benefits to their customers (stuff will be delivered a bit quicker) and creating loads of new jobs… but sadly not for their own local community that is desperate for steady employment. I’ll bet they won’t hesitate to continue to cash in on that name and the beautiful scenery that’s splashed all over the packaging though…

The really nauseating thing is how they recently bought the Altandhu smokehouse building – until now home of Summer Isles Foods but owned by Highlands & Islands Enterprise – apparently without revealing their plans to leave the area. So not only has the community lost one of their main employers, but it can’t even use the building to develop something new.

I don’t think I’ll be buying Summer Isles Food products again. I suspect they would leave a nasty taste in my mouth.

Jenny McBain’s report in the Daily Record.

Coigach Community Development Company are putting up a valiant effort to salvage the situation. You can read their response here.

The Pack Leader won a raffle for the first time ever at the weekend. The raffle at the Big Buie Brunch (see post below) was pretty impressive, with the usual whisky and chocolates sitting alongside meals for two at the award-winning Summer Isles Hotel (on the mainland) and the Tanera Mor cafe (on an actual Summer Isle).

But the PL was even luckier than that – he won a signed print of a beautiful, moody painting of a boat by Achiltibuie artist Gerry Irvine. We’ve been buying Gerry’s greeting cards for years but never thought we’d own a full size picture, so we are extremely chuffed. Have a look at her website here and start making space on your walls.

The PL and I spent a wonderfully civilised Sunday morning at Achiltibuie, that patch of heaven on the Coigach peninsula just north of Ullapool. As well as being the most beautiful place on the planet, Coigach has one of the liveliest, friendliest communities you could hope for, and the Big Buie Brunch was a typically corking event.

The Community Hall (impressive in itself, with a lovely garden including explorey bits for wee folk) was transformed into a bistro with Bucks Fizz on your way in, table service and several thousand Sunday papers to rake through on the coffee tables afterwards. The food was mainly local produce (I had a smoked haddock tortilla, the PL a full Highland, then pancakes and maple syrup), beautifully cooked – there are lots of professional breakfast providers in Achiltibuie although I’ve no idea whether any of them were in the kitchen – and served up with usual relaxed ‘Buie banter.

All this was to raise funds for a new community rowing skiff to join The Coigach Lass, a hand-made vessel that has been doing well for the rowing teams at boat festivals and competitions, including the Great Thames Boat Race last year. Good luck to the rowers – they certainly know how to get a good breakfast down.

In his book Island Years, Frank Fraser Darling described how he and his family were affected by living in a place that had almost constant high winds. On the occasional days that were calm, they found all they wanted to do was lie around, relaxing and relishing the stillness (and presumably the relief from having to chase their belongings around the island every time they dropped something).

We’re getting a sense of that here on the west coast. As we expected it’s much milder than it was in the eastern hills, but also much wilder. I like it. When I got homesick for the wildness of Scotland after living in a very pretty part of Yorkshire for a few years, it was the wind that symbolised it for me. The wind here is the one that I missed: it pulls no punches, it blasts and gusts and howls and hammers with no apology; it’s almost as if it knows folk can cope with whatever it throws at them.

And folk do. There’s none of the hysteria that you get from the national media about gales and storms. People just batten down the hatches, weigh down the wheelie bins and get on with life. When it all calms down there will be an ad or two in the Ullapool News inviting the owner of some inadequately battened article to come and collect it from the garden on the other side of the village where it came to rest. Then we can savour the stillness, until next time.

There are a lot of artists, artisans and writerly types in Ullapool. It would be easy for an insular wee community like this to take itself a bit too seriously, but thankfully that’s far from the case. You only need to read the letters page of the brilliant Ullapool News to see evidence of a fine willingness to poke a bit of fun at everyday life and its absurdities. Or tune in to the most eclectic music selection on the planet on Lochbroom FM.

I hope I’m not jumping the gun by forming an opinion after only three months of living here, but for me the Ullapool attitude is summed up in this photo from the beach. I don’t know who put the first old fisherman’s glove on a fence post but the idea has been enthusiastically taken up by passers-by who all seem to have an eye for a nice line of repeated shape and colour and a good sense of the ridiculous. There are a couple of dozen there, all sticking up like the hands of a class full of kids all eager to speak out. And that’s another Ullapool trait…

Being woken earlier than you want to be is a feature of living in the countryside. When we moved to our house in Nairnshire, there were some hens and a cockerel already resident (abandoned by the previous occupiers) and we soon got used to Mr Oats crowing at the top of his voice any time from about 2am onwards in the summer. After one particularly frustrating morning which saw me in my nightie and wellies flinging open the hen house door and yelling SHUT UP! at a row of bewildered blinking hens, we admitted defeat and re-sited the run at the far end of the garden.

Then there were the baby swallows that went mad every morning when their breakfast was brought – right outside our bedroom window. And the cuckoo on the telegraph wire behind the holiday cottage. And the seagull tapdancing on the caravan roof…

This morning it was an enthusiastic robin serenading a lamp-post just outside the house. It was 4.45am. I turned over, started to feel annoyed, then noticed how beautiful the sound was. The wind had dropped at last and the music was streaming out of the silent night. I lay there for a while just listening and eventually drifted off again. Lovely.

A wee gang of wigeon have been gathering by the shore of the loch over the past few days. There were about a dozen when the PL first noticed them, increasing to thirty-one last time we were able to count them.

The reason we can’t always count them is that sometimes we walk past that spot in the evening, when we’re taking Nosy Norris for her late walk. Then all that can be seen is the reflection of moonlight or the flashing marker buoys on the dark water, but we can still hear the birds chuntering among themselves. It’s a lovely sound, the more gutteral calls punctuated with what sounds like a mini swanee-whistle, reminiscent of the whooOOo0 of the eider ducks.

I don’t know why I’m always surprised that ducks are so beautiful, but somehow I never expect it. Wigeon certainly are, especially the males with their golden foreheads and rosy breasts. I don’t know whether they’ll stay here for the winter or head somewhere further south. We’ll just watch and see, and that’s the pleasure of living among wild things and learning about them day by day. We got to know our local wildlife in Nairnshire so well, I thought I’d miss that familiarity when we moved. To some extent I do, but it’s quite exciting to have a whole new cast of regulars to become familiar with. Like making new friends.