Our walk yesterday started in the small crofting township of Achnaha, a settlement which has several claims to fame: it has unusually large numbers of small businesses per head of population, it sits in the middle of a volcano, and it's surrounded by stunning countryside across which there is miles and miles of open walking.
Achnaha, which means field of the ford, today has a permanent population of nine, but years ago it must have been far higher as the settlement is surrounded by what were once arable fields, and there are extensive peat workings, clearly visible in the above photograph..
One of the businesses has just opened a new holiday cottage, a very smart wooden chalet which is visible in the photo to the right of the village - more details
here.
Having crossed the Sanna burn, we headed eastwards into the hills around
Meall Clach an Daraich - a difficult name to translate but something along the lines of 'the stone of the oak hill'. The reference to stone is appropriate as the hills are formed of eucrite, a hard, iron-rich rock which forms great, rounded outcrops but, if oaks grew there in the old days, they are long gone.
From the summit of any of these hills there are wide views across the western end of the peninsula. Two abandoned villages can be seen, Glendrian to the southeast....
....and Plocaig to the west. The villages have in common that their populations fell to one family which lived in a larger house, the last to be abandoned. Beyond Plocaig can be seen the winding Sanna Burn.
As we approached the north coast the white-sand beaches for which Sanna is famous became visible. This one is known in the family as the shelly beach as its sand is formed of coarse, broken-up shells. The headland to the right of the beach,
Rubha an Duin Bhain, has a small fort on it, so we have always imagined this beach with two or three Viking longships pulled up onto it, defended from attack by the fort.
We reached the north coast almost two kilometres to the east of the fort, where the sea has cut high cliffs into hard igneous rocks intruded at the time of the volcanic eruption sixty million years ago. We ate lunch perched on top of a cliff looking out across a blue sea to the inner isles of Skye, Rum, Muck and Eigg.
Here on Flores in the Azores we have similar demographics only about 50-60 years later than in Scotland. Not far from where I live, there's a village which in it's last days was down to a population of two - a bachelor and his bedridden mother. Only when the mother died in 1992 could the chap move away and the place was finally abandoned. In contrast to Ardnamurchan, however, the empty houses are now completely swamped and overgrown in trees and dense vegetation - it's rather sinister.
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