Shieldaig Grazing

Come and have a graze at Shieldaig. You’ll be vying with the sheep for the choicest grass, but this intimate little strip of village grazing land is quite a treat. Sitting on the hill just above the one-street village of Shieldaig, the site overlooks a bay with a wooded Swallows and Amazons-style island plonked invitingly in the middle and a couple of wee boats anchored in the still waters. Behind you loom the dark peaks of the Torridon Range, which make for challenging climbing or just a brooding presence at your back as you cook dinner over the campfire.

Shieldaig’s on the shores of its own loch, an inlet of Loch Torridon that eats into the land of Wester Ross. Come through the dramatic valley from Kinlochewe in the east and you’ll pass under Beinn Eighe, a black monster of a mountain that has seen better days and is now a great stack of crumbling rock that looks about ready to fall apart.

If you reach Shieldaig in one piece you’ll find a row of neat whitewashed houses just a stone’s throw from the coastal road and right on the lochside. The campsite’s pretty small and there’s no way to book, so it’s advisable to get there early and stake a claim, particularly when the annual fête and music festival is on in late July. After all, you wouldn’t want to run the gauntlet through the black valley and have nowhere to graze, or gaze from, at the end of the day.