This year, the Crow Craigies Climbing Party returned to Ullapool after a long absence.

---

Cul Mor (NC 162119, 849m)

12 kilometres
720m of ascent

Cul Mor is one of a succession of isolated summits lined up beside the A835 as you head north from Ullapool. It’s particularly striking when seen from the path network of the Knockan Crag Nature Reserve, and our walk started from some roadside parking just a few hundred metres beyond the turn-off for the Nature Reserve car park. Its name means “big back”, and there’s a Cul Beag (“little back”) nearby.

A decent path took us up to about 500m on the shoulder of Meallan Diomhain, at which point the going got rocky and the path turned into a succession of cairns.

We skirted around the summit of Meallan Diomhain, with the intention of heading into the Fluich-Choire, and then on to the northeast shoulder of Cul Mor. But we also wanted a view towards our route down—a planned descent into the unnamed high corrie that lies between Cul Mor (the summit at left in my photograph above) and its outlier, Creag nan Calman (at right). The splendidly named Allt Lochan Dearg a’ Chuil Mhoir (“Burn of the Red Lochan of Cul Mor”) descends from this corrie in a series of slabby steps, and we wanted to eyeball a potential route of descent that avoided any steep, slippery ground.

A trace of a path was visible descending from the lowest point in the corrie rim, tracking southeast below Creag nan Calman, and we figured that we’d get down without too much difficulty if we then took a line well to the Calman side of the burn.

Fluich-Choire is the “wet corrie”, and is more of a saddle than a conventional corrie. It was full of small pools scattered among eroded sandstone outcrops.

Our final route of ascent followed the skyline above, over rapidly steepening ground and a final hundred metres or so of grey quartzite boulder-field before the ground lay back and we reached the summit.

With plenty of stone immediately available, the Ordnance Survey surveyors had made the decision to fashion the triangulation pillar from cement and local stone, rather than carrying up their usual load of concrete.

From the summit, we looked north into the classic “cnoc and lochan”* landscape of Lewisian gneiss—an intricate pattern of low hummocks and shallow lochans:

That landscape is broken here and there by mad sugar-loaf mounds of Torridonian sandstone, like Suilven:

Our descent path was easy to find in the col between Cul Mor and Creag nan Calman, and after its long traverse to the southeast, it took us zig-zagging safely down the steep ground beside the burn in much the fashion we’d planned.

To get back to our outward route, we had a brief, steep pull back up Meallan Diomhain, and visited its little summit cairn:

And then back the way we came.

---

Rhue Point lighthouse (NH 092974, 2m)

11 kilometres
220m of ascent

Faced with a day of low cloud and rain coming in at lunchtime, we were wondering how best to use the morning when we chanced on a map tucked away in a folder in our self-catering cottage. A path was marked, running up the coast from Ullapool to the lighthouse at Rhue Point. Ideal, we thought.

So we wandered from our house up the road to Castle Terrace, and then followed a sign for “Riverside Walks” down to a rather splendid causeway crossing the Ullapool River.

A bit of scrappy route-finding ensued, before we emerged beside Ullapool’s golf course. A warning sign urged us to stay on the shore out of golf-ball shot, but you can see that my doughty companions, having noticed a complete absence of golfers, weren’t disposed to follow instructions:

This, as it turned out, was the last route marker we encountered. At the end of the golf course, we descended to the shore and trudged uncomfortably along the shingle for a while, passing the disintegrating hulk of a fairly large boat:

Then we ran out of beach, and found ourselves climbing over a rocky promontory that didn’t feel like any sort of path. Beyond that, we found a route through the undergrowth for a while, and then got ourselves back on to a grassy section of shoreline. This took us as far as the outlet of the Allt an t-Strathain, where we decided that we’d had quite enough shore-walking for a while, and so followed a rough track up through the fields to the road. From there, we strolled along the tarmac for a kilometre to a small car park, and then followed a path out to the lighthouse—arriving just in time to watch the morning ferry departing towards Stornoway.

We went back by more or less our outward route. First, back to the shoreline:

Here, our walk was constantly accompanied by this noise:

Oystercatchers were nesting on the shingle, and were very keen to warn us off:

Then back along a faint path across lumpy bracken-choked hillsides:

But we had one major breakthrough. In the absence of any actual path markers, we realized that this sign probably indicated the existence of a route across the bottom end of the crofters’ fields above the beach:

Entirely dogless, and routinely circumspect around livestock, we passed through a gate, traversed the fields, and emerged through another gate above the beach—to discover that we’d successfully circumvented the awkward rocks that had blighted our outward journey.

---

“Aeroplane Flats” (NC 294231, 650m)

14.5 kilometres
700m of ascent

On 13 April 1941 an Avro Anson aircraft, on a training flight out of RAF Kinloss in foul weather, transmitted a distress call:

Icing up … lost power in port engine … losing height … descending through three thousand feet

No more was heard from the aircraft, and it wasn’t until 25 May that a shepherd happened on the wreckage, and the bodies of the six crew members, on a high sloping meadow between two northern ridges of Conival. RAF personnel made the decision to bury the crew on the spot, and it remains one of the highest and most remote Commonwealth War Graves. The tilted moorland surrounding the grave site has since acquired the informal name “Aeroplane Flats”.

We made our way to it on a day of bleary intermittent sunshine, starting from the car park at Inchnadamph, and setting off along the Gleann Dubh track which takes walker towards the high summits of Conival and Ben More Assynt. But just before the footbridge over the Allt Poll an Droighinn we turned on to a well-maintained stalker’s path that took us north towards Fleodach Coire. (Fleodach means “pertaining to Clan MacLeod”, so this is MacLeod’s Corrie—a reference to the MacLeods of Assynt, who once owned this land.)

Our first stop was on the lip of the corrie, at a small and rather wonky wooden shelter:

From here, we could look across to the sun shining on the ribbon of waterfalls descending from Lochan nan Caorach.

Just out of sight above the falls was Aeroplane Flats. But our stalkers’ path got us there by an indirected route. First across the boggy lip of the corrie:

And then on a long ascending diagonal to the shore of Loch nan Cuaran, where the path ended. We half-expected to find a boat-house or anglers’ shelter up here, but saw nothing.

The ground was rocky and broken, full of odd little lochans and surprisingly wide streams:

But, after a bit of awkward GPS-assisted navigation, we crested a rise and saw Aeroplane Flats. The memorial seemed tiny, and would have been difficult to pick out among the rocks were it not for a faded poppy wreath that must have sat there since Remembrance Day on 11 November.

The inscription reads:

HERE LIE THE CREW OF RAF ANSON N9857
WHO CRASHED IN BAD WEATHER DURING A NAVIGATION TRAINING EXERCISE
ON 13 APRIL 1941

F/O. J.H. STEYN D.F.C.
P/O. W.E. DREW
SGT. C. McP. MITCHELL
F/S. T.B. KENNY
SGT. J. EMERY
SGT. H.A. TOMPSETT

ALSO COMMEMORATED AT INCHNADAMPH (OR KIRKTON) OLD CHURCHYARD

As I took the photograph above, I heard this:

It was the only curlew I heard during the entire trip.

Nearby, embedded in the moorland, is one of the aircraft’s Armstrong Siddeley Cheetah engines:

Scattered through the peat hags are other aircraft parts, including the wheels and undercarriage.

It is, you will gather, a melancholy place. We stayed there for a while, and then made our way back the way we had come.

---

Canisp (NC 202187, 846m)

13 kilometres
790m of ascent

Canisp is another one of those Torridonian sandstone monoliths that protrude from the Sutherland landscape. There’s some controversy about the origin of its name in his Scottish Hill Names, Peter Drummond rather poo-poos the idea that it comes from Old Norse kenna ups “well-known house roof” (because of its whale-back shape), and favours some sort of Gaelic origin involving the old word can, “white”, for the pale grey of its quartzite upper slopes.

Two lay-by parking areas at the north end of Loch Awe give access to a wooden bridge across the River Loanan, and the open moorland and hillside beyond. On our outward route, we walked straight down to the lochside, and then had to plowter through boggy ground to reach the bridge—we found the actual path on the way back.

Beyond the bridge, there’s a clear path across blanket bog, which leads on to the rocky shoulder of Canisp where, as on Cul Mor, the onward route is marked by occasional cairns. But it was impossible to get a rhythm going on the ascent, because of the sheer density of scattered rock:

And it got quite steep:

So I was glad of the pause afforded by taking this photograph. I’ve no idea why this particular rock, among so many others, should have what appears to be a fresh fracture plane exposing its native, unweathered colour. I cast around for its other half, but found nothing.

The wind was blowing so hard on the summit ridge that it blew my sunglasses off my face. So we were glad to find a sizeable shelter cairn at the north end of the ridge:

Unfortunately, it was almost as windy inside as it was outside—the wind was blasting straight through the gaps in the stonework. Eventually we walked around to the leeward side, to get double the protection.

And as we ate lunch, we enjoyed the view of the other side of Suilven, across Loch na Gainimh:

And then out into the wind again, blowing so strongly into our faces it occasionally managed to get inside my mouth and make my cheek go flup-flup-flup.

We were glad to notice a better descent route, which got us out of the wind sooner, and took us down a (largely) rock-free valley between the main ridge and the little outlier, Meall Diamhain.^†

Well down the hill, we sought rightwards for a while until we converged on our outward route. As we retraced our steps through the bog, a couple of irate dunlins swooped overhead—presumably they had a nest nearby.

As you listen to those dunlin alarm calls, imagine, too, the sound of an irate human cry, as one of our number received a direct hit from their droppings. (It wasn’t me.)

---

Beinn Eilideach (NH 170926, 559m)

10 kilometres
580m of ascent

Beinn Eilideach is the prominent hill on the left as you look towards the head of Loch Broom from the Ullapool waterfront. Eilideach is another interesting bit of Gaelic, meaning “full of hinds”, though we saw no deer during our visit.

With heavy rain forecast for the afternoon, we chose it as a morning excursion for our final day.

We drove, somewhat ridiculously, for the short distance through town to the large car park just south of Ullapool. From there, we walked up the steep tarmac road serving the scattered houses of the Braes of Ullapool, turned off on to a farm track, and then exited the farm enclosure through a gate on to the open hillside.

A fairly substantial track runs alongside the Allt a’ Choire towards the hill, switching from its east to its west side as it goes along. It ends at a small dam, tucked into a steep-side gully. This seems to have been the location of a succession of water-management projects going back to the nineteenth century, according to Canmore. (There’s the remains of a sizeable concrete water tank farther down the hill.)

On-line walk reports for this hill mainly describe a pathless slog through heather from this point onwards, but after some discussion we decided to cross the dam to the east side of the river, and see what we could find.

And lo! on the east side, at the top of the loose rocky slope you can see in the image above, there was a well-trodden path heading in the right direction. So we followed it:

It afforded easy walking and took us to within 500m horizontally, and 100m vertically, of the summit. So that turned out well.

At the top of the hill is another of those trig points constructed out of local stone and cement, with a shelter cairn built around it.

But it’s not the highest point on the hill. For that, we had to walk a short distance farther east, to reach some slabby stuff that’s a metre or so higher than the trig point.

But the whole summit plateau was a splendid viewpoint. To the southwest we had the jagged profile of An Teallach:

To the northwest the view down Loch Broom to Ullapool:

And to the north an array of sandstone peaks, some of which we’d explored earlier in the week:

(The view above spans from cloud-shadowed Ben More Coigach on the left to Canisp at the extreme right.)

And today’s bird soundtrack was supplied by a couple of golden plovers, warning us off from their nest on the summit.

We returned by our outward route, finding the path again without too much trouble, and teetered safely back across the dam. Just before we reached the farm buildings, we had our best wildlife sighting of the entire trip:

A golden-ringed dragonfly landed next to us and appeared very reluctant to take off again. If you enlarge this image, you’ll just be able to see why. It had just caught a wasp, and was intent on restraining it, while the wasp continued to put up a struggle.

And so back to the car, after another fine week among the hills.

---

* A cnoc is a small hill; a lochan is a small loch—which pretty much summarizes the appearance of the landscape. If you pronounce cnoc in the Gaelic manner (roughly croch-g) no-one will know what you’re talking about. The phrase is often rendered “knock and lochan”.

^† If that name Meall Diamhain seems familiar to you, it’s because we encountered Meallan Diomhain as an outlier of Cul Mor. Meall means “lump”, and meallan is a little lump, so these are words applied to small rounded hills. Gaelic diamhain/diomhain is odd, though, because it means “idle” or “useless”. The relevant Ordnance Survey Name Books translate Meall Diamhain as “Idle Hill” and Meallan Diomhain as “Idle Little Hill”. The diamhain spelling seems confined to Sutherland (four hills called Meall Diamhain are recorded in that county). There’s a scattering of ridges called Druim Diomhain across Argyll, Inverness-shire and Ross & Cromarty. One of these, above Kilfinan Bay on Loch Fyne, is translated as “Lazy Ridge: i.e. the ridge where people were in the habit of lounging about.” I’m prepared to bet neither of the hills mentioned here have attracted many loungers. Perhaps the “useless” epithet is more likely, given how rocky the two hills are.

---