Golspie's Variety of Walks

When we chose to come here we really didn't appreciate what a variety of walks was available from the small cottage we bought in the centre of Golspie. Within a few minutes of our home, without using the car, there are walks in deciduous woodland in the grounds of Dunrobin Castle, there is....

....a walk from the town which follows the ancient coast road all the way to the northeast tip of Scotland, passing immediately below the castle, now a long-distance track which can be followed to John o' Groats.

In the opposite direction, there is the sand beach we so much enjoy, which runs southwest for four kilometres to Little Ferry and Loch Fleet, from whence one can return....

....by following the old coast road along the area of heathland between the beach and a coniferous plantation.

To the west there are numerous walks - shared by mountain bikers - in the largely coniferous woodlands on Sutherland Estate land below Ben Bhraggie, but if one climbs the hill through them there are....

....miles and miles of walking across the hills and mountains which stretch all the way to the west coast of Scotland.

Big Skies

Low water, light seas and the wide beaches of a spring tide combine to emphasise the immensity of the winter sky, while at times....

....sand and sea and sky merge into a pattern of greys and pale golds.  But the clouds are constantly changing above the expanding landscape of the sands....

....clumping together into long streamers which process across a sky which continues to evolve....

 ....until the light fades before flaring into the brilliant colours of sunset.

Golspie's Townships 2

On Ardnamurchan, the vast majority of townships were what I termed 'clachans', settlements of some five or more families living in a community and holding their inbye, outfields and common grazings in common under the runrig system - William Roy's map, above, shows the clachan of Coiremhullin. In the Golspie area, when William Roy created his military map some time around 1750 - see earlier post here - the farming arrangements appear to have been much the same, but by the 1770s few of the townships were still organised in this way, though....

....Craigtown (above), seen in John Home's map of 1772, seems to have been been one of the exceptions. The other townships, such as Kirktown, right, had seen their randomly-shaped fields reorganised into neat rectangles and parcelled up into lots, with an average of about five lots to each township and each lot assigned to an individual small tenant farmer.

Craigtown shows all the features of a runrig settlement. A head dyke, a possible section of it marked at top left, would have surrounded the original settlement to keep animals off the arable land during the growing season. The township's land would have been held from the laird by a 'tacksman', a 'tac' being a farm. The tacksman would often be an ex-soldier on half pay, who would sublet the fields to 'tenants-at-will' who had no rights on the land and could, therefore, be turned off it at any time. The 'clachan' settlement is clearly visible at bottom right.

Compared to Ardnamurchan the fields are much bigger, as would be expected since the land here is richer while Ardnamurchan's fields were developed wherever there was even a tiny area of usable soil. The plough lines in the fields are typically sinuous, evidence that the plough was horse-drawn.

Ben Bhraggie

Ben Bhraggie dominates the village of Golspie as does the monumental statue of the first Duke of Sutherland, 1758-1833, which sits on top of it. We had already climbed up to it twice but, with the weather set fair for the day, decided to do it again, not by the direct route straight up from the town through the forestry but by following the track round to the right, the north side of the hill, which circles right round to approach the summit from the west.

It's the track which was used to cart up both the massive amounts of stone that were required to build the memorial and also the statue itself, in part paid for by grateful tenants many of whom had seen their friends and relations cleared from Sutherland lands over the preceding couple of decades.

About half way up the track is a small 'lay-by' with a stone water trough, presumably for the horses which were dragging the carts. Although encrusted with moss and lichen, it's still in good condition.

Along its middle section the track looks across the glen of the Golspie Burn to one of the Sutherland estate's township areas, called Backies, which, like most of the townships, retains little evidence of the old, pre-clearance structures. However, visible in this picture near the top of the hill at far right, Backies does boast....

....a very impressive broch, an Iron Age dwelling and fort with massive dry-stone walls. Unfortunately, it's rather inaccessible.

 As the track nears the top there are fine views southwards across Loch Fleet and....

 ....northwards along the coast towards Brora.

The Duke must get fairly chilly on his exposed hilltop, staring out across the Moray Firth with his back to most of the lands he owned. The area round the base of the monument is, unsurprisingly, much vandalised, though the descendants of those who were cleared from his lands who opted to emigrate to places like the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia are probably secretly rather grateful to him.

Our final view was straight down into the village but by that time a chill wind and clouds beginning to move across the sun sped us home again as fast as our tired old legs would allow.

Stranded

We're not the only couple who enjoy a lonely walk along Golspie beach on a fine, if not sunny winter's day. We ought to be walking somewhere else for a change but there's too much that draws us back to the beach, not least....

....that each time we walk along it there's something new to see, either in the way of wildlife or what might be called deadlife - what's washed up overnight and stranded on this beach, like this egg mass from the common whelk Buccinum undatum. This is a typical sized mass but....

 ....further along the beach we found two more of the largest I have ever seen.

There are often shells from this species washed up on the beach, usually rather broken, but yesterday we found this one.

Our prize stranding of today was this ray which....

....Mrs MW agreed to approach even though she was understandably wary.

It was a bit battered and frayed round the edges but we think it's a common, or blue, skate, Dipturus batis. This one was big - 1.4m from wingtip to wingtip and 1.9m from nose to tail - but small compared to the record which was 2.85m long.

The species is critically endangered, and its range has reduced considerably. While it used to be found all round the British Isles it is now confined to our Atlantic coast, particularly off northwest Scotland, yet this one was firmly in the North Sea. Perhaps this is an encouraging sign.

Windswept

With low tide now at 8.30 in the morning it's once again possible to get onto the sand beach to the south of Golspie before the tide comes in, but today we had to contend with a fierce southwesterly breeze blowing straight into our faces, a wind which both wove streamers of pale sand across the beach and....

....whipped the tops off the waves as they broke.

Little wonder there was almost nothing in the way of bird life along the beach, not until....

....we had passed the end of the artificial sea wall made of imported boulders to where the cobbles of the storm beach form a natural barrier, where a small movement....

 ....drew our attention to a group of a dozen or so waders camouflaged against the stones. Look carefully and you will find six ringed plovers, a bird we haven't seen along the beach in some weeks, and, sleeping peacefully between them with its head tucked under its wing, a single sanderling.

We walked for about an hour, heads down against the wind, before turning back, at which point the wind promptly dropped and we walked home with warm sunshine on our backs.

Typhoons

We woke to find snow on the hills around Golspie and even some slush down to sea level but after a morning of wintery showers the sky cleared, so we....

....walked to Drummuie at the southwest end of the town, where the sun had burned the snow away, and then....

 ....up into the forestry on the slopes of Ben Bhraggie.

A forestry walk isn't my favourite, particularly if its coniferous forest as there always seems a sad lack of wildlife in it - the occasional chirrup of a bird and, as happened today, a rare, fleeting sight of something a little larger, this time a beast with a long bushy tail. It wasn't a squirrel as it was too big and, in any case, even though they ought to be there, we haven't yet met a Ben Bhraggie squirrel, red or grey.

The best that can be said for forestry walking is that, if one is lucky, there's the occasional glimpse of a view - here looking down onto Golspie High School and the centre of the village.

Today we had the additional frustration of being able to hear, but not see, the fighter jets that were circling out over the Dornoch Firth, though we finally found a clearing where we could see them, at least two Eurofighter Typhoons, probably based at Lossiemouth.

There's very little in the way of air activity here. We rarely hear or see a passenger plane flying over and we've only heard fighter jets briefly on one previous occasion.