Assynt, the emptiest corner of the Highlands, the people who were cleared off it, and the people who bought it back.
The emptiest, most beautiful, most apparently untouched landscape in Britain is one of the least natural things you can point a camera at. The emptiness is real. It just isn’t old, and it isn’t an accident.
Drive into the far north-west of the Highlands and the standard reaction is the obvious one: that this is wilderness, ancient and pristine, country humans never quite managed to fill. Mountains standing alone out of bare moor, lochans with nobody on them, miles of nothing in every direction. It looks like the land before people. It is, in fact, the land after them.
Two hundred years ago these glens were not empty. They held townships, shared fields, summer grazings, whole communities who had worked this ground in Gaelic for centuries. Then, across a few decades on either side of 1800, the people were removed. Not by famine or plague or slow decline, but by decision, on purpose, to make room for sheep, which paid their landlords better than tenants did. The wild you photograph in Assynt is a cleared room with the furniture carried out. The silence is not the silence of a place nobody ever lived. It’s the silence of a place emptied.
The land was emptied on purpose
The story has a name here, and it isn’t a gentle one. The Highland Clearances.
The most thorough version of it happened right around here, on the Sutherland estate, more than a million acres held by a single family. Between roughly 1809 and 1821 the Countess of Sutherland and her advisers cleared something like fifteen thousand people off the inland straths to turn the ground over to commercial sheep. In 1814 a factor named Patrick Sellar cleared Strathnaver by burning the houses, in some cases before the people inside had got fully clear of them. An elderly woman died. Sellar was tried for it, acquitted, and went on to farm the emptied land himself, prosperously, for the rest of his life. The homes weren’t only cleared but levelled, so the sheep could graze without obstruction and the families could never come back to shelter in the stones. The people who lived through it were resettled on thin coastal crofts or put on ships to Canada and Australia. Some of the most beautiful empty country on earth is beautiful and empty for exactly the same reason.
What the land remembers
And if you know where to look, the land kept the evidence.
Walk the glens with the history in your head and the emptiness fills back in. Those low green rectangles in the grass are the footprints of houses. Those long parallel corrugations on a hillside, the ones that look like nothing, are old cultivation ridges, the last gardens of people who were sent away. Every loch and crag and pass still carries a Gaelic name, precise and descriptive, given by people who knew this ground intimately and were then removed from it, leaving their language behind on the map like a forwarding address. The land only looks blank. Read it properly and it’s covered in writing.
The poet Norman MacCaig spent half his life summering in Assynt, looking at these exact mountains, and kept circling one question: who can really be said to own a landscape like this one. The man who holds the title deed, or the people who belong to it. Standing under Suilven, on bare gneiss around three billion years old, the oldest rock in Britain, the question gets a strange double answer. The rock does not care who owns it. It was here three billion years before the first claim and will be here long after the last. But the turf, the thin green skin stretched over the rock, remembers everything. It’s the youngest thing in the view and it keeps the only record that hurts.
Three billion years deserves a moment of honest arithmetic. When this rock formed there were no trees, no eyes, no footprints anywhere on Earth, nothing complex enough to have a story. For almost the whole of its existence there was nothing here to see and nothing to see it. The stories are the new part. All of them. The Gaelic names and the townships, the burnings and the sheep, the buy-back, the two of us pulled over on a verge trying to take it in. On rock this old, everything human is breaking news. The Clearances happened, in gneiss time, a few seconds ago. So did we.
The long way north
Getting here was its own day, and we need to say something about the leaving first.
You exit Skye over the bridge, which has a story with a good half, a bad half and an ugly half, like everything else up here. The good: since 1995 it has tied the island to the mainland and ended the wait for the ferry. The bad: for its first nine years it was, per mile, the most expensive toll crossing in Britain, and the islanders fought it with a civil-disobedience campaign of simply not paying until the tolls were scrapped in 2004. The lovely, hiding inside the ugly: the old ferry it replaced used to carry everything a community is made of across a few hundred metres of water. Livestock. Hearses. Wedding parties. We drove over free of charge, thought about the wedding parties, and said goodbye to the island in the mirror.
Then the road did what this country’s roads keep doing, which is escalate. At Lochcarron we crawled past a village green in the middle of its Highland Games, pipers carrying over the fence, and caught, through a gap in the crowd, a very large man throwing what we now know to call a caber. We couldn’t stop. We wanted to. A village nearly emptied in the Clearances, throwing tree trunks for joy on a summer Saturday, felt like a sentence we’d be needing later. Somewhere past it a road sign announced we had entered Wester Ross, and two Game of Thrones fans require no further encouragement: we drove the next ten miles through Westeros, spelling be damned, with a Scottish murder podcast on the stereo and a playlist Dee found called Scottish Bangers queued behind it. The soundtrack held for days.
Then the Bealach na Ba. The Pass of the Cattle, the old drovers’ route where beasts were once walked over the spine of the peninsula to market, now a single-track road climbing from the sea to six hundred and twenty-six metres in a fistful of alpine hairpins, closed in winter, feared by hire-car clutches, and mentioned in the same breath as the great passes of the Alps and Norway. Single-track driving is its own culture up here, a running exchange of pull-ins, flashed lights and raised fingers of thanks, stressful and courteous in exactly equal measure, with the occasional motorhome parked mid-sentence to keep everyone honest. The climb was extraordinary. Applecross itself, on the far side, we surrendered to the clock: ninety minutes we didn’t have. Into the file it went.
By Torridon we had stopped announcing that each view was the most beautiful thing we’d ever seen, because we kept being proved wrong within the hour. The Torridon hills are around a billion years old, sandstone laid down before there were plants on Earth to hold it, and because they stand straight up from sea level you get every metre of them at once. Then Loch Maree, which some argue is the most beautiful loch in Scotland: sixty-odd wooded islands scattered down its length, remnants of the old Caledonian pine forest, and, on one small island, a ruined chapel where the desperate once brought their afflicted to be dunked in the loch and towed around the island as a cure for madness. Medicine, mercifully, has moved on. The place looks like it would still take the case.
We’ll be honest about the state of us by then. The second half of that drive, Torridon to Ullapool and beyond, took us apart quietly, and neither of us has fully put it into words yet. Some country doesn’t ask to be described. It asks to be driven through slowly with the radio off.
Ullapool broke the spell in the best way: an actual town, planned for herring in 1788, whitewashed along its bay, ferries to the Outer Hebrides, fifteen hundred residents and the seagull population of a city. It has more music, art and seafood than a town this size has any right to, plus two rival chippies with awards between them, a derby we had no time to adjudicate, to the visible grief of this family’s fish-and-chip correspondent. We had one pint at the Arch Inn, where they were setting up screens for that night’s third-place match, England against France, and got back in the car, which took discipline in every direction. More people were on that one street than we’d seen all day.
And then Assynt began, and the country changed for the last time. Fewer cars, then barely any. The mountains let go of each other and stood alone. We turned in at Inchnadamph, whose name means the Meadow of the Stags, and there is nothing at Inchnadamph, which is the point of Inchnadamph: a lodge, a river, the head of Loch Assynt, and no light for miles with any interest in polluting anything. We dropped the bags at the Explorers Lodge, walked out into the last of a rare clear evening, and put the drone up over Loch Assynt at sunset. One of the most beautiful driving days of our lives, and it had taken the whole day, and standing at the edge of that loch in that light, both of those facts felt exactly right.
The day we spent in it
We had a slow day here, the sort the schedule optimistically files under rest.
For the two of us, rest has never meant the kettle and a book. It means a camera somewhere beautiful and the calm that comes in through the eyes, and this is almost certainly the only time we will ever stand in this particular corner of the world, so the plan was to spend the day filling it.
The fog had other plans. The morning came up wrapped to the ground and stayed that way, the peaks that own this landscape, Suilven like a stone ship run aground on the moor, Quinag, Canisp, all gone into the white. They’d introduced themselves the evening before from the road, which turned out to be the whole of our allowance. Stac Pollaidh stayed hidden all day, unclimbed. Into the file. And our first thought on surfacing, honestly, was Greg: by the time we’d found the kettle he was already hours into his lake. Perspective arrives in strange packages up here.
We ventured out around lunch with a plan built on a famous pie. Lochinver keeps an award-winning pie shop people drive serious distances for, and it also keeps a Sunday, and it was Sunday. A local pointed us instead at a stall called Flossie’s at Clachtoll, toasties and coffee, get there before mid-afternoon, and the drive out along Loch Assynt to find it was, once again, one of those small roads that quietly dismantle description. We took our time. There was no other way to take it.
Clachtoll is a handful of houses beside white sand that turns almost Caribbean on a kind day, right up until the North Atlantic reaches your ankles and corrects the impression, and it walked straight onto the trip’s short list of favourite places on earth. We ate our toasties on the beach, watching a few brave souls in the water, and met a couple coming out of it who told us they live here six months of every year, that it is their favourite place on the planet, and, in the best line anyone gave us all week: if you’re brave enough to take on the North Atlantic, the North Atlantic will reward you. The water was thirteen degrees. We remained unrewarded, and at peace with that, and thought of Greg again, mid-marathon at that very hour in a Swiss lake a full eight degrees warmer. We’re bringing him here one day. For training. We’ll hold the towels.
Achmelvich, fifteen minutes on, is bigger, busier, laced with boardwalks and trails, and every bit as beautiful on paper. It didn’t land the same way, through no fault of its own. Sometimes a place simply sits down in your soul, and Clachtoll had already taken the seat.
And under all of it, the silence, which we had been warned about and still weren’t ready for: the deepest of the whole trip, engine off, doors shut, a quiet with actual weight to it. We know now what that quiet is made of.
There are oddities too, because there always are. Ardvreck Castle we saved for the day’s end, and the weather very nearly repossessed it. A broken MacLeod tower from the late 1400s on a tiny peninsula in Loch Assynt, photogenic to the point of showing off, with the burnt shell of Calda House a few hundred metres along the shore for company. Its history runs the full Highland palette. The Marquis of Montrose was handed to his enemies here in 1650, a betrayal the loch has never quite been forgiven for. A chief’s daughter named Eimhir is said to have leapt from the tower and to walk the ruins still. And the loch itself is supposed to keep an each-uisge, the Celtic water horse, which lures riders onto its back and then dives. We arrived in fog with the rain already deciding, flew one slightly damp drone sortie in the last workable minutes, and got the tower, the loch and the weather conspiring in a single frame, which is the only honest portrait of this place anyway.
And out on a headland above the white sand at Achmelvich, with no sign to find it by, hides Hermit’s Castle: a tiny thing the size of a garden shed, cast in raw concrete by an architect in the 1950s who built it over months, stayed a single weekend, and never came back. We tracked it down and stayed only briefly ourselves, which felt like the correct tribute to a building whose own architect gave it one weekend. It is, comfortably, the most us building in Scotland, and that’s a competitive field.
The noise in the quiet
The nineteenth of July, our rest day in the quietest corner of Scotland, turned out to be one of the busiest days of the trip for everyone in the family except us.
While we were doing as little as possible, Greg, Tracey’s brother, was a thousand miles away with his face in a cold lake, swimming a marathon. Twenty-six kilometres across the Zürichsee, Rapperswil to Zurich, in the water from seven in the morning for the better part of a day. It’s training. The real target is the English Channel in a year or two, and the only way there is to bank long, cold, faintly unreasonable swims like this one until the body stops filing complaints.
This family swims, all the way down. Hayley came home from a Commonwealth Games a household name. Kai is about to race at another; and there’s Greg, putting in the lonely miles across a Swiss lake on a random Sunday. But with the famous races belonging to other people, he is back in the water for himself, chasing a crossing of his own. The quietest member of a loud sporting family, setting off alone across a lake at first light for a goal that is fabulously his.
The results reached us that night, and we are going to shout them. Greg won his age group by more than an hour, and touched Zurich second overall. Second, of everyone, at fifty-plus, across twenty-six kilometres of lake. The English Channel had better start warming up. We remain, forever and happily, sideline champions.
We did our own bit for the cause from the lodge, naturally, where the Explorers had rigged a projector and turned an entire wall into the World Cup final, pints in hand, in a small crowd of strangers who taught us more about Scotland in one evening than three guidebooks had managed. We cheered for Spain, on underdog principles, with sincere apologies to Argentina, and the whole room enjoyed the world together, which is what rooms are for. Every relay needs people holding the edges. We are reliably good at that leg, and so, for years, was Greg.
Scotland were at a World Cup for the first time in twenty-eight years, long enough that some of the squad weren’t born for the last one, and the whole country has gone gloriously to pieces over it. A few weeks ago tens of thousands of their fans, the Tartan Army, took over Boston for their opening match, marched the streets behind bagpipes, watched Scotland win a game at a World Cup for the first time in thirty-six years, and sang Flower of Scotland loud enough that a rumour shot round the world they’d just set the record for the loudest crowd ever recorded at a tournament. Whether the rumour survives daylight is beside the point, and was certainly beside the point to anyone in a kilt.
Scotland, it should be said, were not in the final. They’d been drawn with Brazil and Morocco, and nobody pretended otherwise. We learned some of the words to Flower of Scotland anyway, the way you do.
And there’s something about taking all of it in from here, of all places. A brother grinding out a marathon in open water, a nation making the loudest, proudest noise it has managed in a generation, all of it reaching us in the most thoroughly silenced corner of the country: the emptied land, the cleared straths, the quiet with weight to it. A people once burned out of glens exactly like this one for being worth less than sheep, now the most joyful travelling support on the planet, an ocean away, singing themselves hoarse. Something happens when people gather to celebrate something together, or push themselves stupidly hard for the love of it, and we appear to be driving straight through the middle of it. Making noise in the quiet. The silence here, it turns out, was never the end of the story.
The people who bought it back
And then, because this corner of the Highlands refused to let the story end where the story usually ends, the best part.
In 1992 the North Assynt estate, by then the kind of sporting estate the cleared land had mostly become, went up for sale after its owner, a Swedish land speculator, went bust. It was about to be carved up and sold off in lots. And the crofters who lived on it, the descendants of the people this whole history had happened to, did something almost nobody had done before. They decided to buy it themselves. They formed a trust, launched a public appeal, and the money came in from everywhere, including from families abroad who could trace their own line back to people cleared off Highland ground generations earlier and wanted, at long last, to help buy a piece of it back. On the first of February 1993, the Assynt crofters took title to their own land, free and clear, for the first time in the history of anyone they were related to.
It made headlines around the world, and it opened a door that is still open. Eigg, Gigha, Knoydart and others followed, communities buying back the places they live. MacCaig’s question finally got an answer it could live with. Who owns a landscape like this one. More and more, the people who belong to it.
What you carry south
We went to bed early that last night, because the alarm was set for half past four, and because Dee had finally confessed why. A surprise she’d been keeping for months needed us at Fort William by quarter past ten, and an alarm that brutal deserves its reason the night before. Tracey went to bed knowing. Sleeping was another matter. That story belongs to the next post. It all felt too short, Assynt. We’re already planning the longer return, and we don’t say that about everywhere.
We came to the far north-west for empty beauty and found a place that is really a held story: of people removed for being less profitable than sheep, of land that kept every footprint in the turf, and of descendants who came back and bought the emptiness so that it could stop being only empty.
We believe in leaving our own stories on the land of the places we visit. Assynt quietly corrected us. Some ground has been keeping its stories since long before we arrived, the painful one and the proud one both, and the most you can do is learn to read them and add nothing but your attention. And yet we left something anyway, the way everyone does: footprints on white sand, a night of noise at a projector, a drone’s small shadow crossing a loch. On ground this old, leaving a story isn’t marking the place. It’s joining it. The newest sentence in a very long book, already being absorbed.
From Inchnadamph the road finally turns. This is the farthest point, the top of the long loop, and from here every mile runs back south, toward Glencoe, and then toward a city about to fill up with the whole world, and a pool, and a boy we crossed the world to watch. The empty country let us go gently. It is good at letting people go. It has had the practice.
Read more Greenland/Scotland travel stories here:
The Night the Fjord Disappeared
