Highlands Hiking - Torridon - Dean and Emilie Travels

Scottish Highlands Hiking – Torridon

July 2

After the introduction to this leg of the UK adventure, these journal pages for the Backroads hiking trip in Scotland are less detailed than is typical in the other pages in our blog. There are photo captions and brief descriptions of where we are or where we stayed. I’d like to say there is a strategic reason for this, but it’s really because I didn’t keep a detailed log of the Backroads portion of the trip.

We started our UK trip in Inverness because this is where our organized hiking trip of the Scottish Highlands with Backroads set out from. The hiking group was to meet up at the Inverness train station at 10:00 A.M. The Backroads trip was titled, “Scotland’s Highlands – Inverness and Isle of Skye”. It is in the Backroads category of “Walking and Hiking. Premiere Hotels”. So, yes, the hiking was great, and at times difficult. But those evenings in the “premiere hotels” certainly helped ease any aches from long rocky hikes in wind and rain.

Em and I had our final glorious breakfast at the Castle View Guesthouse. We said our goodbyes to our hostess, Eleanor, and checked out. We grabbed our gear and walked the eight minutes to the train station. It was a relatively small group of 16 people, including our new friends from the Alaskan Backroads trip the previous year, plus three leaders. We, of course, were the last ones to arrive, but we got there right on time. There were three vans.

We were shuttled toward Kinlochewe for about one hour, mostly along North 50, to an old, very small tin church off the side of the main road. Here we had a basic picnic lunch (eaten in the rustic pews), met our fellow hikers, and received our Backroads orientation. The ride was quite scenic. Though offered casually, the basic lunch was prepared by a local celebrated chef, to nobody’s surprise…this is Backroads after all (aka “Snackroads”).

After the orientation we got back in the vans for another 10 minutes to our first trailhead in Kinlochewe. We hiked around Loch Clair and Loch Coulin.

Backroads Hiking, Scottihs Highlands, Kinlochlewe, Loch Clair, Loch Coulin — Setting out on our first hike in Scotland.

Scottish Highlands, Scotland Hiking, Backroads, Torridon — The Gang. )ur Backroads pals and us. See the same faces in the Alaska adventure on this blog.

After about 6 miles of fairly easy hiking in cloudy but dry and cool weather we got in the vans and headed to Torridon. We checked in to the Torridon Hotel, a Scottish castle hotel. Now, these were fine accommodations in every way. Beautiful architecture, rooms, grounds, views, and great food. They even have their own long-haired Scottish Highland cows.