Creag Meagaidh

For the highlight walk of our long weekend in Lochaber we visited the Creag Meagaidh National Nature Reserve. It contains a large area extending from the north shore of Loch Laggan up into the Monadhliath Mountains, and is described as one of Scotland's best wildlife sites.

Our objective was Coire Ardair (top left in the map), a wild and dark corrie with a lochan, Lochan a' Choir, set beneath dramatic cliffs and approached along a dog-legged valley originally cut by a small glacier. The walk from the car park at Aberarder was, for us, ambitious, being some seven miles for the round trip, but we....

....followed a well-maintained track which worked its way steadily upwards, passing from mixed heather and new-planted forestry into birch forestry and then....

....out onto the sort of open Highland moorland that I have always so loved. Sadly, the sun only broke through grey cloud fleetingly - well, this is the west of Scotland in October - but when it did the colours were stunning.

The distance was, as we had expected, a little too much for us so, with great sadness, we stopped where the glen turned southwest - see the red star on the map - where we rested while we looked up the glen towards the corrie and across to the opposite hillside, where one sharp-eyed member of our party spotted....

....small patches of white moving on an area of flatter, open ground. These turned out to be black grouse, at least eight of them, males already 'strutting their stuff' to establish territories on a 'lek' ready for the coming spring mating season. Since this was the first time I had seen black grouse it went a long way towards compensating for our failure to reach the lochan.