Loch Bad na Muirichinn, Inverkirkaig
The road south from Lochinver, towards Inverkirkaig, is a winding one with some sharp corners. One such corner, half a kilometre beyond the turn down to the sea at Badnaban, provides a brief view to the east of a rocky gorge. The gorge contains a substantial burn draining Loch Bad na Muirichinn (satellite image, photo 1). This is an area we had not visited for many years and a sunny morning on 16th April 2022 tempted us up the gorge to explore the southern edge of the loch (NC0919; map in photo 2).
We parked at the corner of Charlie Russell’s log-processing area and, to avoid a thicket of gorse, cut across boggy moorland to the gorge. Patches of bog pondweed in two shallow pools provided cover for several palmate newts. A rocky path, used by both sheep and deer, runs along the southern side of the burn beside a fence. This provided views of the steep crags on the north side (photo 3), on which we spotted some large hanging bushes of prostrate juniper.
At the head of the gorge, the valley opens up, providing a wide-ranging view over the large loch, with well-vegetated islands, woodland along its southern flanks and Suilven in the distance (photo 4).
Woodlands
Having negotiated the loch-side end of a substantial sheep fence, which runs over to the Kirkaig valley, we entered the woodland. It is a tangle of ancient downy birches, with scattered rowans and occasional willows, rising from a damp grassy floor with many clumps of primroses (photo 5). The swollen bases of some of the older trees are covered with dense cushions of mosses and liverworts, containing in places the darker green fronds of Wilson’s filmy-fern (photo 6). We keep mentioning the last, but it is a defining feature of the shadier parts of our Atlantic woodlands and a delight to find.
Elsewhere, dead standing stems and fallen branches of the birches bore an assortment of bracket fungi. These included the small colourful brackets of what we took to be the extremely common turkey-tail Trametes versicolor. However, this later proved to be a close but much rarer relative, the ochre bracket Trametes ochracea (photo 7).
Fungi
Also present were massive perennial leathery conks of hoof fungus or tinder bracket Fomes fomentarius (photo 8) and numerous softer white brackets of birch polypore or razorstrop fungus Piptoporus betulinus. It is intriguing to see how historical uses of these two species live on in their common names. They are very common in our northern birch-woods, and a useful reminder of the vital role of their wood-rotting mycelia in slowly recycling the substance of these ancient trees.
Other birches were host to very curious growths of woody tissue, large spherical burrs (photo 9). Their cause is uncertain, so far as we know, but they must provide lots of niches for ‘wee beasties’.
The shape of the willows and their fallen leaves identified them as the hybrid between grey and eared willows Salix x multinervis, which is not uncommon in Assynt. Variety in the tree cover was provided by a small grove of aspens, no doubt all connected to one another, at the top of small crags on the shore of the loch. Fallen skeletonized leaves were spotted with the brownish pustular remains of the rust fungus Melampsora populnea, which recycles them on a much shorter time-scale.
Boggy clearings
We had our lunch on a mossy tump beside one of many boggy areas in the woodland, between the outcrops of Lewisian gneiss. This provided us with a list of the typical plants of damp local woodlands, including meadow buttercup (despite its name), bluebell, wood pimpernel, marsh thistle, wood sorrel and sanicle. A nearby crag also protected from browsing had a large old multi-stemmed holly.
Red deer had excavated a large wallow in one boggy area (photo 10); from the look of the vegetation, they use the woodland in some numbers (together with some roe deer, we are told). A nearby pool had the glutinous remains of frog spawn. Other animal life included a fleeting glimpse of a common lizard in a drier area and a pine marten scat. Birds were not numerous, apart from willow warblers, which had apparently arrived in Assynt on a broad front just the previous day, and predictable blue tits, great tits, chaffinches and wrens.
Peninsula
Half way along the southern shore of Loch Bad na Muirichinn there is a striking Y-shaped peninsula (colour-enhanced satellite image, photo 11). It is partially-wooded, but with open grassy areas, and a promontory between two bays on the eastern side which bears a substantial rocky outcrop ringed by crags.
As we dropped down a grassy narrows connecting the peninsula to the southern shore of the loch (photo 12), we noticed snuffle holes left by badgers. They were probably after the tubers of earthnut Conopodium majus, which is locally plentiful in the grassland (isolated mole hills were also found here in March 1993).
Just across the narrows, a fallen downy birch had continued growing, re-rooting itself and thriving, despite having much of its original root-plate exposed to the air (photo 13). Such ‘phoenix trees’ might dismay a forester, but are a reminder that they can live on for many decades. Nearby was a birch log with a row of substantial holes, about 2cm in diameter, probably made by a great spotted woodpecker in search of insect grubs (photo 14).
Evidence of former cultivation
We climbed a bracken-covered ridge on the far side of the peninsula and then sat and closed our eyes for a while in the warm sunshine, with the silence only interrupted by the splintery call of a robin. When we woke up, we could see, across the loch, a small building on its northern side (NC098200, photo 15).
Malcolm Bangor-Jones tells us that this is the ruin of a remote ‘shepherd’s house at Badnamurichan occupied by Alexander Wilson and family in the late 1840s and early 1850s’ and that it was ‘previously a shieling, with signs of having been cultivated pre-Clearance, i.e. 1812’. Former cultivation ground to the east of the ruin shows up clearly on the satellite image (photo 11), and reminds us of times when the Assynt landscape was much more intensively utilised than now.
The moorland vegetation around the head of the loch, towards Suilven, looks really sparse, the result of devastating fires that have consumed parts of this landscape in recent years. It will take the area many decades to recover.
Crag
Dropping down the eastern end of the ridge, we made our way over to an imposing crag on the rock outcrop, white-crusted with calcareous tufa deposits (photo 16). Crevices shelter both the lime-loving form of maidenhair spleenwort (photo 17), and its relative, black spleenwort. A damp area houses fat green cushions of Mougeot’s yoke-moss Amphidium mougeotii (photo 18), and other crevices the round-capsuled clumps of common apple-moss Bartramia pomiformis (photo 19).
These particular ferns and mosses are characteristic of rocks with some degree of base-enrichment, and this crag is obviously part of one of the many mafic or ultramafic dykes that thread their way through the local gneiss. However the BGS map of this part of Assynt shows both in the vicinity and we need geological advice to decide which.
At the eastern end of the crag there was a lone hazel, with deer-browsed basal shoots and, at the foot of an adjacent outcrop of this enigmatic rock, a fine single-stemmed example of the same species, with a trunk c.50cm in diameter at its base. They were the only hazels we came across.
Wall
We turned around at this point, and made our way back along the loch and down the gorge. A slight change in route, just short of the road, took us closer to a magnificent wall running along the south-eastern side of the burn, around what is known locally as the ‘Football Field’ (photo 20).
We later learned from Malcolm Bangor-Jones that the wall was built in 1866-1867 by John Mackenzie, grandfather of the late Margaret Mackenzie of Inverkirkaig. Alexander Mackenzie, Ground Officer, noted in estate records dated 30th August 1867, ‘at Strathan yesterday and measured stone dyke built…on south and north sides of Angus McLeod lot: 494 lineal yards at 1/6 per yard…I think when you see it you will say that it is one of the best built of the kind in Assynt’. And so it is.
A feature of this wall is the incorporation in it, either as whole rounded stones or split to make wedges (photo 21), of much Torridonian sandstone, a rock that does not outcrop in this part of Assynt. We had been noticing its presence in the course of the burn all the way down from the loch, since it often carries striking mosaics of yellow and rusty-red lichens, very different from those on adjacent gneiss. These Torridonian erratics are part of a ice-transported ‘boulder train’ that originally emanated from Suilven.
We had walked only about 3km in our five hours on the hill, but there was so much to see, even so early in the year, and we may well return to the area in the summer. We should like to thank Malcolm Bangor-Jones, David Haines, Bruce Ing and Gordon Rothero for their contributions to our account of the area.
Ian M. Evans and Gwen Richards