I had yet another visitor! Tommy – a good friend and, importantly, current custodian of my cats – popped up for a long weekend. I was keen to head over to Torridon, taking advantage of Tommy not knowing what he was in for! His flight was delayed so Torridon was dark and shrouded in heavy mist when we got there, which made scoping out places to park for the night trickier. We opted for the car park at the bottom of Beinn Alligin which was out the way, and had plenty of space. We shared the car park with one parked car… and the mountain rescue team who were out on the mountain in shifts all night searching for the owner of said car. The morning shift of mountain rescuers found him, fine, wild camping. Not sure who called mountain rescue worried about him but couldn’t help but feel pretty bad for the rescue teams searching through the night in the mist for someone who was willingly camping out on the hill. D-:
Incidentally we consulted my munro books over breakfast at a cafe in Torridon and decided we would take on Beinn Alligin the next day, having already spent the night in the car park, and undeterred by mountain rescue’s night search for someone on the hill. Beinn Alligin is a ridge walk that includes two munros, and the “Horns of Alligin” which are three spiky rocky peaks to scramble over.
Anyway we didn’t have walking weather that day – the soggy mist was so thick that we couldn’t even see the hills – so we took a drive. My Uncle George had been telling me about Shieldaig, since the Woodland Trust owns and conserves the Ben Shieldaig estate. I can confirm Shieldaig is 100% charming. We spent some time chilling out there, and stocked up at the village shop. I was able fill up from the drinking water tap at the little harbour, and had fun leaving a donation in the box at the end of the hammerhead.
We drove on round the Applecross peninsula, and over Baelach na Ba, which has the steepest ascent of any road climb in the UK and is the third highest road in Scotland. It was a great drive, though we did hit some traffic.
We parked up for the night in a spot with a great view, but I forgot to take a picture of that because we were up and out the next morning and raring to get up the hills.
Torridon is home of spiky mountains, which seem to rise out of nowhere. They look like sleeping dragons. And because they rise out of nowhere, you’re climbing practically from sea level. The climb up the first munro of the day was a real slog. But when we got to the top it started snowing!! My first snow of the year!
The route led on to a scramble down to a ridge walk which felt like a proper ridge. This was really satisfying to walk.
Before long we were at the top of the second munro eating our second sandwiches. We got some fabulous views of the other spiky hills of Torridon.
The scramble over the Horns was a lot of fun. It warmed up a bit as we’d dropped a couple hundred metres in altitude, and the sun cam out along the way. We got some good views back to the munros we’d just added to the bag.
Our path down from the shelf in the pic above was a steep scramble down almost 300m in elevation which involved several bum-slides (I’m not above it). We tucked into some celebratory tablet at the bottom – for the non-Scottish, tablet is like hard/crunchy fudge. We bounced down the path along the river back to the van on a high from looking back at the ridge we’d just conquered. Though I think for Tommy’s part it was a sugar high from the tablet.
Only Young Twice 