I have wanted to visit Sandaig for a very long time. Ever since first reading Gavin Maxwell's "Ring of Bright Water" decades ago, I have harboured a desire to see how the real place compares to the one in the book. Is it still as wild and remote as it was depicted nearly sixty years ago?
I love the book for two reasons. Firstly because it describes this part of Scotland so powerfully and, secondly, because it's all about one man's love for otters. While I could never feel comfortable about someone keeping an otter as a pet, if you are going to do that the west coast of Scotland has to be the perfect place. The International Otter Survival Fund thinks so too. It's based at Broadford on the Isle of Skye, a swim across the channel and climb over the hill away. They regularly rescue orphaned otters, their mothers usually casualties of being hit by a car. This is exactly what happened to one recently in Glenelg. Thankfully a local resident knew where to take the surviving otter cub.
When Maxwell moved here after the Second World War and his failed attempted at building a business based on hunting basking sharks on the island of Soay, Sandaig would have been even more remote than it is today. To get to the nearest village of Glenelg you have drive up a steep hill from Sheil Bridge to the top of Mam Ratagan (1116 feet).Ā
On the day we did it the weather was fine affording breathtaking views of the valley below and the Five Sisters of Kintail. From the top we were surrounded by the rock topped mountains, endless sky, the orange of dying bracken, the purple of flowering heather and the deep green of pine trees. These colours make up the typical late summer highland landscape. I could smell the heady aroma of bracken mixed with pine. On a fine day like this the road is a marvel but in winter it must be daunting. It does however reinforce a sense of entering another, wilder world.
The road drops down the other side of the mountain to the shore. If you carry on down the single track road you reach Upper Sandaig - a road that comes to an end in one of the last true wildernesses in Europe.
In Maxwell's time there was no convenient forestry track down to Sandaig as there is now. He had to hike down over very rough terrain (so bad that one winter he was forced to crawl on his hands and knees through snow and high winds) following the course of a river, that had carved its route through a deep gorge down to the shore below.Ā
Now there is a very good track that cuts through what was once a pine plantation and which a sign on a gate explains has recently been 'harvested' because 'we love trees'. It always seems brutal to see large areas denuded of trees even if this is a commercially grown forest where more will be planted in their place. It has however left the landscape probably much as it would have been after the war but with ghostly tree stumps littering the hillsides for miles.
The track wends and winds it way down the hillside and comes to a beautiful view point overlooking Sandaig bay with a hint of Rum and Eigg in the distance. From here you can see the beach with its small skerry of islands to one side, the tiny unmanned lighthouse on the furthest one and the grassy field upon which Maxwell's croft sat until it was burned to the ground in 1968. It's a tranquil but slightly eerie place that must be brutally exposed in a winter gale, the weather funnelled up the channel between the mountains on both the mainland and Skye. It feels very much a place that time has left behind.
There are few signs of habitation now. An old croft still stands at the foot of the hillside its windows and door in place, its roof rusted and white walls moss and lichen stained. A memorial to Maxwell's beloved and most well known otter, Edal sits beneath a fir tree where once a supposedly cursed Rowan stood. Another to Maxwell himself sits at what was one end of the croft in which he lived. His ashes are buried beneath the massive stone.
His house sat at the far end of this now lush grassy field, sheltered by a small hill from the worst of the weather. It faced away from the sea looking back up the hill hinting at how extreme the weather can be. It is a peaceful place from which you can hear a waterfall cascading down rock and the river bubbling its way to the shore.
Maxwell wrote: "It is the waterfall, rather than the house, that has always seemed to me to be the soul of Camusfearna, and if there is anywhere in the world to which some part of me may return when I am dead it will be here." Ā He came very near to getting that wish as his memorial lies within hearing distance of the tumbling waters.
Ā "The Ring of Bright Water" and its two sequels, "The Rocks Remain" and "Raven Seek Thy Brother" are beautifully written but melancholy books. Maxwell was clearly a complicated man and one who preferred animal - and especially otter - to human company. He is best known for writing about otters (and for resurrecting interest in them) but he also writes powerfully about many of the other creatures he encountered while at Sandaig - the seals, Dolphins, wild cats, deer, hares and birds he shared this corner with. Above all it is the description of landscape in this part of the world that echoes through his books, a landscape that is still much the same today despite better roads and new technology making it a little less remote.
We spent an hour or so wandering along the rough and pebbly shore, gazing along the cliff like rock walls and island skerries at either side. The river was high making the likelihood of getting across the rope bridge that still spans the bubbling water without getting wet impossible. So we headed back up the forestry road, at one point noticing the tracks a huge herd of deer had left in the mud.Ā
The walks ends by a delightful sheltered pond that I found myself hoping that local otters (perhaps the descendants of two of Maxwell's indigenous otters - Monday and Mossy) still use to clean the salt from their fur.
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