The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Coigach and The Fiddler Stairway to
Location: Grade: Distance: Time:
Assynt
Serious mountain walk
10 miles/16km
6-7 hours
IT WAS the ancient Norse who gave Ullapool it’s name. Ulli’s Steading was then, as it is now, a gentle oasis amid a harsh, mountainous landscape, but drive north from the town, over the spine of the Rhue peninsula, and you enter another world.
Ardmair is a magnificent spot. From the campsite a spit of white shingle curves gracefully out into the bay pointing towards the sanctuary of Isle Martin. Beyond, protecting the bay from the Minch gales, the Summer Isles float alluringly on a sea of green. Flocks of dunlin and ringed plover feed on the salt flats, gulls wheel overhead and brightly painted fishing boats bob and dip on the water but, for all these attractions of sea and shore, it is a mountain that dominates the scene.
An extensive wall of weathered Torridonian sandstone commands the northern shore of the bay, an ancient relic of one of the most ancient land masses in the world. The long sandstone barrier runs from Garbh Choireachain to Speicin Coinnich, and is known as Ben Mor Coigach. The hill’s protective cap of Cambrian quartzite has long since gone, but the bare bones of this venerable relic still rise straight from the sea to nearly 750 metres, a long wall of seamed buttresses, gullies and cliffs.
While the seaward wall is impressive, it’s really only a front, hiding an intricate, complex system of peaks, ridges, corries and lochans. This area of Coigach is a gem. Unspoiled and challenging, it begins to reveal itself more fully as you drive further north. Ben Mor Coigach, at 743m, is the highest summit, but the other main peak of the area, Sgurr an Fhidhleir, rises to a sharp and dramatic point.
It’s a high eyrie of a summit, the culmination of a huge blade of rock that rises from the bare moorland close to the reflective waters of Lochan Tuath.
The traverse of these two hills brings together all the best characteristics of a walk which blends sea and mountain in that distinctive combination that you only find on Scotland’s western seaboard. There’s a peculiar quality to the blend here in Coigach, as though the spaciousness of the vast seascape emphasises the height of the hill, and you catch a notion you’re mounting a staircase to the heavens. Indeed, it’s perhaps not too fanciful to imagine the traverse of Ben Mor Coigach’s long south-west ridge beyond Ardmair Bay as a high-level promenade to Tir nan Og, the fabled Land of the Blest beyond the shimmering ocean of the Celtic twilight.