Embark on a walking, fishing and wildlife-watching adventure among the mountains and lochs of this enchanted region of northern Scotland
By Fergus Collins Fergus Collins is editor of BBC Countryfile Magazine and host of the Plodcast. He is looking forward to a third visit to Assynt this spring and uncovering more of its secrets.
DISCOVER
It isn’t catching my first brown trout that I’ll remember best. It isn’t the otherworldly cragscapes. It isn’t the birdsong or the convivial evenings in the local harbour bar. It is a single distant view across a serene loch.
I was sitting in a rowing boat far out in the water when I spotted snake-like heads above bejewelled necks: three majestic divers patrolling like ships of war. Something about their primordial poise, their utter sense of belonging set against the rugged, distant loch shore is fixed in my memory.
They were black-throated divers, birds I had never seen before. In a landscape I have long dreamed about but that had taken me almost 50 years to get around to visiting.
It was my friend Gavin who signed me up for adventure in Assynt. He is a fly fisherman and seeker of places far from human bustle. Much delayed by Covid, I finally made it there, arriving on a June evening. The last two hours of road, from Inverness to Lochinver, over firth, through forest, under mountain crag and, finally, along the shores of Loch Assynt, felt like a release. Settlements dwindled along the way, the peaks rose and the sweeping road became a Top Gear presenter’s fantasy.
Assynt and Coigach is a rugged region of Sutherland just north of Ullapool. It harbours hundreds of lochs, legendary mountains and coves of silver sand. And a tiny human population. The human story is a big one, however. Like much of Scotland, the land is divided among a handful of major landholders after suffering unforgiveable clearances in the 18th and 19th centuries. But fortunes were partially reversed in 1993 when the Assynt Crofters Association bought the North Assynt Estate, enabling “ordinary people who live and work on the land to have some control over their own economic future” (see box, page 22). While crofting continues, tourism is an important source of revenue, especially from those who come to fish the lochs for brown trout. And that was our chief reason for coming there.
I am not a good fly fisherman. It is a balletic art of rhythm and timing and release. A good proponent, such as Gavin, can cast so the line and fly kiss the wa
