Beach!

Sea monster

Our last day in our holiday cottage - boooooo!  We woke up to beautiful sunshine - yay!  What to do?  The beach of course.  We have been waiting for the best day and this was certainly it.

We got up around 9, had breakfast, got ourselves ready and headed off at 10 to a beach recommended to us by friends in Ingleton: Achnahaird Beach on the Coigach peninsula, not far from Achiltiebuie.  It took an hour winding down the single track roads down to it - but it was worth it - the setting was spectacular - framed at the back by huge mountains growing out of the sea a huge expanse of golden sand and gentle waves lapping up.

Achnahaird Beach

When we arrived we were the only people on the beach - we couldn't believe it - we quickly got stuck in, Tom was digging almost immediately and the sand was perfect digging sand - wet enough to stick when put in buckets, but dry enough to sit down on.  The tide was going out so the beach got bigger and bigger and bigger as the day went on.

We settled in quickly - we played cricket for a while and then went down to the sea.  It wasn't horribly cold, but cold enough for me not to want to go in - I am such a wuss when it comes to cold water!  Tom, however, is much braver and he walked in quite a long way - this was a gently sloping beach meaning that you could walk, and walk and walk and not really get an deeper.  In the end Tom sat down in it to get completely wet - he tried to swim in it but it was too shallow and therefore too difficult.  He enjoyed it though and I managed to get in up to my thighs, which for me was good.

Beach cricket

Construction work

The rest of the day on the beach was spent paddling, sandcastle making - we made quite a magnificent fort with a self filling moat and many fortifications, playing Velcro tennis, cricket and just generally enjoying the view and location.

Before we knew it, it was 2.30 and we had an appointment with a pie shop in Lochinver which was about half an hour away and closed at 5pm.  So we gathered all our stuff together and headed back to the car.

We then drove to Lochinver along a very narrow road with fewer passing places than the previous road and some very narrow bits with jutting out rock on both sides.  Needless to say it was slow going and Matt had to do quite a bit of reversing, but we got there in the end and the views were extraordinary and worth the effort.

So we had been told that we had to visit the pie shop in Lochinver during our time up here.  I was expecting it to be an isolated shack on the loch, but Lochinver is actually (for round here) a sizeable settlement, located at the end of a sea loch.  It was, as is always the case round here, beautiful, but we only had one thing on our minds...pies.  We found the place immediately and got a table.  The pies looked great, but they also had an amazing menu full of lots of other great sounding food.

Scallops

Pie!

The boys both went for pies: chicken curry pie for Matt and Steak and Ale for Tom, whilst I went for a starter portion of scallops for my main.

We were all very happy with our choices, my scallops we some of the best I've ever had and the boys loved their pies.  As we had starved ourselves all day, we could all fit in a pudding too: apple and blackcurrant pie for me (delicious - the pasty was sublime and the filling tasty and plentiful), whisky and fudge bread and butter pudding for Matt and millionaires shortbread tart for Tom - we were all very happy.

We figured we should go for a little plod afterwards, so went for an amble along the loch, when Tom spotted a deer.  It was a very tame deer, so we were able to get quite close to it which was great.  We then tried spotting some otters on the rocks - we thought we found them initially, but we had mistaken them for birds.  Oh hum, a deer will do!

Ardvreck Castle

Red deer stag

We then started to head home along much bigger roads.  The scenery once again was magnificent, we cruised along Loch Assynt for most of it.  Towards the end of the loch we came across a ruined castle, Castle Ardvrech.  It was built in 1590, so it is amazing really any of it is still there.  It is built on a promontory on the loch, reached by walking across a beach to an island.  The location was stunning and very strategic - you could see up and down the loch quite easily and apparently it is regularly cut off from the main land when the water is high.  It wasn't today - so we went across and had a scramble.  We then carried on our way, lo and behold we came across another deer in the open, and this one had magnificent antlers.  We stopped at the first place we could and Matt ran back to take a photo - he came back smiling - apparently the deer saw him and looked straight into the camera - bingo.

We carried on home - went past the house and to a service track for a reservoir track that the owner of the house recommended we do.  We drove up, up, up to the top - about 2 or 3 miles much longer than we were expecting, and the view was great - but we had seen so many good views today - we were almost all viewed out!  We came home.  Had showers, then Tom piped up that he was hungry, so I made him some tea and the boys watched cricket.

Wow!  A busy, hot, sunny, rewarding day.  Nothing I would have changed.  Shattered now - but I have a G&T to help me on my way.