Tag: Loch Sunart

50th Birthday Holiday 10: Glenborrodale Nature Reserve

Continuing my account of my 50th birthday holiday with an account of the walk around Glenborrodale nature reserve.

Welcome to the latest post in my series about my holiday in the far west of Scotland around the time of my 50th birthday (I was away from 25th May to 1st June inclusive). We are now starting to deal with Friday May 30th which was a fairly busy day.

WHEN WEST IS EAST

Glenborrodale is itself pretty far west, and the nature reserve is west of the village. Thus most people approaching the nature reserve do from the east, to the point that the directions in our booklet of walks for getting there assumed as a default that everyone would be approaching from the east. However, we were actually approaching from the west, which meant that the instructions for getting there had to be mentally flipped – we had to realize that we were going to see the nature reserve before we saw the village it is named after. Here is a map plus some supplementary detail:

This map, extracted from the information board at Strontian, shows the whole Ardnamurchan Peninsula. We were staying more or less at the point where the road to the lighthouse diverges from the road to Portuairk, right at the western end of the peninsula, while Glenborrodale is in the south-eastern corner of the peninsula. This was actually the furthest east we travelled on any of our excursions during the week.

THE WALK

The walk is circular, ending with a stretch along the road to get back to the car park. The nature reserve part of the walk starts with a long ascent, then a brief flat patch where one walks on boardwalks (these boardwalks are superb, and made the walk much more enjoyable than it might have been). Then there is a long downhill section back to the road. There are information boards at various points along the route about what you can see. This nature reserve is under the aegis of the RSPB and they have a section about this walk on their website. I did not manage to spot a Violet Beetle, but I did get one green bodied dragon fly and three common/ highland darters in the course of the walk. I thoroughly recommend this walk should you be in the area.

PHOTOGRAPHS

Here is my gallery from this walk….

A brightly colour butterfly resting on a dandelion.
A green bodied dragon flu rests on a fern frond.
The first of the three darters (I saw them all in very quick succession)

Scotland 2022: The Western Edge of Mainland Britain

An account of a quick visit to the westernmost point in mainland Britain.

I am continuing my series about my holiday in Scotland (after a long and stressful day of travelling back on Saturday I was far too tired to do anything yesterday). We have reached Tuesday (six days ago now), the centrepiece of which was a tour of the Ardnamurchan Distillery. That will be the subject of my next post, while this post deals with the first event of that day.

ARDNAMURCHAN POINT

The Ardnamurchan Distillery is located just west of the village of Glen Borrodale on the northern shore of Loch Sunart, which is the southern edge of the Ardnamurchan peninsula. Beyond this to the west is Ardnamurchan Point, the westernmost point of mainland Britain (to give you an idea of how far west the Ardnamurchan peninsula juts out to the west, the Inner Hebridean isle of Eigg is due north of the western half of the peninsula), and our plan was to see this before arriving at the distillery for the 2PM start time of our tour.

Unfortunately, a combination of a later than intended start and the poor quality of some of the roads meant that we only had time for a very brief stop at the Western edge of mainland Britain before turning round and heading back to the distillery.

Here are the pictures from the outward car trip:

I just had time to take two pictures at the point:

The journey back to the distillery was enlivened by an encounter with someone I have dubbed ‘psycho cyclist’. We were behind him on the road and he took a long time to pull into the side so that we could get past, and did so with astonishingly bad grace – swearing at us and gesturing manically. I am normally sympathetic towards cyclists, but this individual did himself no favours with his wilfully aggressive and confrontational attitude. I took a few more pictures heading back: