The Allt na Doire Buidhe

We woke to cloud, a stiff southeasterly wind, shafts of golden sunlight passing across the entrance to Loch Sunart, and to a forecast which promised that rain would not arrive until around midday, so....

....we drove out along the B8007 to a point just south of Loch Mudle.

This is a rare photograph, taken by Mrs Diary, of that wonderful moment when the boots are being laced and one knows that, for the next few hours, we'll be alone in magnificent scenery.

We had chosen to follow the Allt na Doire Buidhe, the burn of the yellow thicket, upstream from the road....

....into the area to the northeast of Ben Hiant. The glen is choked at its lower levels with shrubs and small trees. There are those that say that, if the sheep and deer were taken away, the upper levels....

....would be as forested, but a far more likely reason is that the trees survive in the glens because they are sheltered from the wind.

There's a point where the land opens up into rolling hills, one of our favourite areas, dominated by the peak of Ben Hiant, centre. We followed the burn across this bowl of soggy land and climbed higher....

....stopping for coffee to look back the way we had come. The burn drains into Loch Mudle, left, the water just visible to the right being Lochan a' Mhadaidh Riabhaich.

One of the pleasures of this area is that there are always red deer to watch, at this time of year small groups of hinds with this year's young.

The burn we'd been following rises close against the lower slopes of the Ben Hiant ridge, and promptly tumbles over a small waterfall into an enclosed, meandering, and classically V-shaped valley before coming out into the more open land. We followed it back downstream, on the left bank....

....passing the circle seen to the right of this shot. It's formed of a coarser, slightly taller grass, but, although I had hoped to find a wall and that it might once have been an animal pen, there's no obvious reason for its existence or shape.

The sun only appeared briefly, once, but the rain held off until we reached the car.