Christine's walking & birds blog

We walked from home on a very windy morning, following an indistinct, overgrown path into the Rhidorroch Estate. We had to fight through quite a lot of bracken and scrub before gaining the open hillside. Here, as elsewhere during the walk, the main problem was the boggy ground. The wet summer has left the moors as saturated as a giant sponge. 

Wildlife was hard to come by with a buzzard, two ravens, a couple of stonechats and a handful of swallows being the only birds we saw. A golden-ringed dragonfly careered across the path, and magpie moths fluttered in the heather.

As I recorded the moth it began to rain quite hard. Paths became streams; while the next obstacle was a high fence running across the hill we wanted to climb. We walked along it despairingly, boot prints in the soft ground suggesting that many others had done so before us; until, where it turned off downhill, we found a ragged hole that someone had made in the wire and clambered through. The big estates are now obliged by law to allow you access - but they're not obliged to make it easy for you. The fence made Greger swear - and he doesn't do that very often.

This was an interesting little notch in the skyline, a sort of dry valley leading through to another sweep of moorland.

The wind dropped and the rain stopped - bringing another hazard. Midges. We battled on, our hair sticky with insect repellant, our feet now soaking wet and our trousers bespattered with mud.

It was a relief to get down to the dry track along Loch Achall, turning to follow the Ullapool River that runs out of its western end. The sun came out and it was quite warm.

Here the birdlife picked up a little. A family of grey wagtails skipped off along the stony shore of the loch. A young wheatear was on the opposite bank of the river; and Greger spotted a juvenile dipper busily foraging in the swift, shallow water.