Perimeter

Quintin Lake encounters changing conditions on his coastal photo walk

Ithought I’d seen it all by now, but the postman’s path to Culnacraig passes over some of the steepest ground I’ve yet encountered. If there wasn’t a path bidding me to keep going, I’d have turned back. I later found out there have been several rescues of people stranded or injured here.

I’m heading into Coigach and Assynt where the isolated mountains of Suilven and Quinag rise steeply from flat moorland like totems in the landscape. For three nights in a row, sunset appears with a glowing intensity as I’ve never seen before. The entire

sky is glowing vivid red and pink with the mountains burning fire orange. Holding my hand into the sunlight, it glows gold as if illuminated by a gelled spotlight in a theatre. Previewing the pictures on the camera the images appear unreal like I’d applied an extreme Instagram filter.

The bus stop at Achiltibuie houses a chair and four empty bottles of beer which form a neat line next to me – it must be a long wait for the bus here. The spot I’ve chosen for my tent above the dunes at Achnahaird feels safe, sheltered and beautiful. The nearby Dun and Viking hut circles suggest I’m not the first to think so.

At Loch an Eisg-Brachaird, having crossed the rough ground, I stop to cook a late breakfast by the shore. Vivid green grass and sea pinks blend into black, white and yellow lichen enveloping boulders nestled against the golden-green of seaweed. The whole scene has the luminosity and invigorating harmony of a Monet.

It’s bright enough to walk until midnight, and I camp at Stoer Point. When it finally gets dark in the early morning, the only lights I can see are from four lighthouses: north towards Cape Wrath, west to Lewis, south at Loch Inver and close by at Stour Point. The Shetlanders have the perfect name for the energising summer twilight: they call it ‘simmer dim’.

Sixteen-year-old Robert McTaggart whistles tunefully from a hillside. He’s half-Icelandic, home-schooled and very wise. “I don’t watch the news, just talk to folk on the road. People look too quickly at the sunset when they should spend an hour – it’s so beautiful”.

Behind me the most prominent mountains and the roughest coastline are starting to recede. I should be tired, but the proximity of Cape Wrath, the wild north-west point of Scotland, pulls me onward.

The scale of the weather front passing over the Minch from Stoer Point is accentuated by the inclusion of the cottages in the foreground. The light was changing very quickly – a few seconds before this frame, I was being rained on and the foreground was black. Postproduction consisted of a twostop gradient filter to balance the tone of the land and sky.