NC500 - Clachtoll to Durness
Day 3 of our NC500 adventure started unexpectedly – emerging from our warm sleeping bag cocoon to find our tent covered in snow! Not exactly a bucket list item you add for yourself, but a surprisingly fun start to the day. And much better than waking to relentless Scottish rain.
Just a short way up the road, we went in search of our first stop of the day - Achmelvich Castle. The Hermit’s Castle holds the title as the smallest castle in Europe. It was constructed in 1950 by architect David Scott as a poured concrete folly. A strange structure, complete with room(s) and windows and a door that have since been vandalized and removed. Andy climbed onto the roof and the sheep baa-ed as we explored the castle and it’s most prime position.
Walking onward with the sheep we visited Achmelvich Beach. It was the first, but not last time we saw snow on a beach. The lapping waves had melted away the snow and left a mark along the beach dotted with reds and blacks of seaweed washed ashore. The white, a stark contrast to the usual colours of a Scottish beach, and the turquoise water made somehow brighter.
We got back in the car and just kept driving North. Passing mountains, lochs, deers and other tourists, pulling into the passing places and giving a wave as we all enjoyed the beauty of the place we were stopping in. The Kylesku bridge crosses over Loch a' Chàirn Bhàin in Sutherland and curves neatly into the vista, gorse framing it’s perfect positioning.
We came to a lunch stop and had a wander along the beautiful Oldshoremore Beach. It was low tide and bright. The sun sparkled off the shallows and the waves. The tide pulled the water in different directions and the wind blew in the sand dunes. So sunny some others took a dip in the ocean, but we gave it a miss and kept on driving.
Finally making it to the top, we pulled into our past stop of the day at Smoo Cave. Formed 480 million years ago in the early Ordovician era, Smoo Cave has had many faces before today’s. Once a fishing port, it was also prohibition era whisky distillery before it was the tourist attraction. Today this is the largest sea cave entrance in the UK, growing to this size thanks to erosion over the cave’s 480million year lifetime. It was massive inside the part we could explore. So big, it has it’s own internal waterfall. I wonder what else the cave has seen and housed over its long life.
We finished our underground exploring and headed to our campsite along the road for the windy evening to come. We chose, by rookie error, to set up camp on the edge of a high cliff with the best view down to the beach. But spent the last night of our NC500 journey sleeping somehow soundly, perhaps comforted by the constancy of the howling wind.
