Sunday 6th October, 2024 – Thurso, Tongue, Smoo, Durness, Balnakeil, Kylesku, Lochinver

Distance driven: 126.0 miles
Time at the wheel: 3 hours 22 minutes
Heiland coos spotted: 1 (Finally!!!)

We left Thurso and the charming Thurso Beach House Apartment with its views across the water to Orkney, to head for our next destination, Lochinver.

We would be covering a lot of mileage and and awful lot of scenery during the day, so we got away early, repacking the car between squally showers. The weather wasn’t looking good but we had no choice – we were booked to be elsewhere and so off we set. The landscape was becoming more dramatic now, and we were beginning to encounter the increasingly stroppy sheep that would be a feature of the second week of our trip.

It is fair to say that these beasts have a decidedly insouciant approach to traffic. Their attitude is that it’s their road and they’re not sharing it with anyone. I decided not to argue! We were also beginning to get ever clearer views of the mountains of north west Scotland, though they did seem to be on the shy side, lurking inside the clouds.

Wanting a break once we’d crossed the Kyle of Tongue, we stopped off in Tongue itself at the rather lovely Tongue Hotel where an Antipodean barman served us coffee and we considered the possibility of coming back some other time and booking rooms there.

Moving on, our first proper port of call was Smoo where we wanted to take a look at Smoo Cave, just outside Durness. You can visit if by boat or do what we did and take one of the two paths from the car park on the cliffs (which also houses a useful public toilet block). As regards the paths, stand looking out to sea and then take the left hand side path NOT the right hand side one unless you want to take the considerably longer and steeper route. In the photo, the right hand path is the one you can see and is taken from where the path starts.

The cave has one of the largest entrances of any sea cave in Britain at 50 feet high and was formed by freshwater from a burn that runs down into the rear chamber, and by salt water in the outer chamber where the sea has eroded the cliffs. When we finally got down there, we discovered that the only way to get to the inner chambers of the cave system was with the guides who are there ready to take you in. at £15 I was prepared to give it a go but quickly had to give the idea up because they can only take cash and we weren’t carrying any. We went as far as we could and then climbed back up the easier path to the car park, disturbing a small flock of yellow-winged birds that I couldn’t identify at the time. On later investigation it turns out they were siskins, not a bird I’d seen before.

I suppose we should not have been too surprised by all the geology around us, given that we were now in the North West Highlands Geopark, which is a UNESCO Global Geopark. Our plan had been to go and get some lunch in the Smoo Cave Hotel that we’d spotted as we were parking up, but that plan was stymied by the fact that it was not long after noon on a Sunday and they only start serving food at 2pm on Sundays, and don’t even open the bar until an hour before that. We decided we didn’t want to wait and simply drove the couple of miles to Durness, parking by the Cheese ‘N’ Toasted van which used to be moored at Smoo Cave. We were very glad we did. Their toasties are quite something – though they’re a bugger to try and eat in a car. We should possibly have sat outside but the wind was so fierce it’s likely we’d have lost the toasties to it. The Highlander, which is stuffed full of haggis and three different cheeses was fantastic and massive and we couldn’t finish all of it, so we saved it for later as we were having another self catering night.

And the other upside of going there was the utterly beautiful beach at Sango Bay which we could admire while waiting for our toasties to be ready. It really wasn’t beach weather. Our next stop was at Balnakeil Craft Village, an eccentric community that reminded me rather of Christiania in Copenhagen, having started out as a military installation. Our first call once there was to see the Durness Deep Time exhibition, designed by geologist Dr. Björn S, Hardarson. It provides a deep dive into the geology and archaeology of the area and was really interesting and surprisingly detailed given the small space it occupies. Many of the other businesses were closed, whether because it was Sunday or because it was October I can’t say. Stop number two was at Cocoa Mountain, because we’d missed the branch in Dornoch due to lack of time. This was a mistake on our part. We tested the hot chocolate and it really was as good as they promised – and it could be had with a choice of four chocolates each. We packed those into a bag for our dessert later that day! 

The road after that got ever more interesting, and I found myself wondering how the buses (the timetables could be seen on a corner of Balnakeil) manage. It’s an A road which in my experience don’t look like the A836 does up there! The driving really does require concentration, a car in good condition, and consideration for and from other road users. It’s why I kept stopping in the handily placed parking spaces that would appear every so often. Do use them. Do not park in the passing places as we saw some idiots do.

And then, finally, as we reached Kylesku, we found a friend. About half a dozen other tourists were already gathered by the fence, feeding her handfuls of grass and scritching her between the horns. She seemed to be lapping it up.

The last stretch into Lochinver was relatively easy. We were soon there and settled in to another AirBnB, this one equipped with a splendid log burner. The last time I’d lit a fire in a rental apartment it had been in Brussels where the landlords had left all the necessary materials to start an open fire but had neglected to mention that the chimney had not been swept… It ended about as well as you might expect (at least I didn’t set the place on fire) so I was a touch nervous about it. However, the instructions supplied proved accurate and we were soon warm and toast in front of the fire with a pre-dinner drink and the reheated toasties as very substantial canapes.