You never know what you are going to come across. On 17th August we made what was intended to be a short visit to Culag Wood. Its purpose was to photograph some plants that Gwen had found earlier, on an area of ‘waste ground’ in a former quarry up the track just to the west of the Leisure Centre (photo 1, NC090220). This messy patch of land probably belongs to Highland Council, but it has its interest, and the track provides useful access to parts of the Wood less frequently visited.
Conspicuous amongst the dumped soil, rocks and assorted woody debris were at least ten tall yellow-flowered spikes of great mullein Verbascum thapsus (photos 2-3). This woolly-leaved biennial ‘produces copious quantities of long-lived seed’ and is regarded as an ‘alien’ in the north-west of Scotland, although native elsewhere in the British Isles.
It was first recorded locally in 1966 on waste ground in Lochinver, and is found around the Village Hall and its carpark every year, occasionally elsewhere. Amongst the mulleins were some huge fruiting spikes of foxglove Digitalis purpurea, towering above us. Many local plants have had an exceptional season in 2026.
Scattered in the vicinity were the colourful heads of another alien species, feverfew Tanacetum parthenium (photo 4). This former medicinal herb hailed originally from the Balkan Peninsula; it is a persistent perennial with strongly aromatic leaves. It was first reported locally in 1943 ‘outside the garden wall, Culag Hotel, Lochinver’, as a ‘garden outcast, on the shore above high water mark, but subject to much spray’ (when the shore came right up to the Hotel). It still occurs not far away on the breakwater, and elsewhere in a few places in Assynt.
Further afield
Gwen’s collie Zara needing her afternoon walk, we thought that we might continue up the track and find our way through the Wood to Billy’s Path. This started well, with sightings of three butterflies, a scotch argus on the path, a red admiral on ragwort and, somewhat later, a speckled wood.
The last was flitting along a sunny patch of the track adjacent to a hitherto unrecorded wych elm growing out of a crag (at NC08982194). With a trunk at least 30cm in diameter, it may be the wind-blown offspring of well-known trees on the Higgledy-Piggledy Path.
Shortly afterwards, we came across one of the most striking fungi found in the Wood, a curiously contorted example of the conifer mazegill Gloeophyllum sepiarium (photo 5, NC08872201). This large bracket fungus parasitises old Scots pines, causing an ‘intensive brown rot which rapidly destroys the infected wood’.
Its fruiting bodies take a variety of forms, from cabbage-like rosettes growing on stumps, through twisted clumps like this one, to more conventional stacks of brackets, one of which we found later on the trunk of a dead pine on Billy’s Path (photo 6, NC08892212). This same individual had been photographed four years previously by Gwen (photo 7), and it was interesting to see that it had grown a couple of the spore-producing brackets in the intervening time. Some bracket fungi are long-lived, as are their less fortunate hosts.
Off piste
Between noting the two large fungi, we had been wandering along well-marked deer paths, with our minds on the practicality of felling and extracting some of the huge sitka spruces remaining in this part of the wood. We finished up in part of the wood that neither of us had previously explored, with no precise idea of where we were.
This was a salutary experience for two local naturalists who have been visiting Culag Wood for more than forty years. We back-tracked, eventually emerging from areas of tumbled wind-blown canopy at the start of Anna’s Path, and then found our way back to the Harbour down Billy’s Path. It had been an ‘exercising’ afternoon for both us and Zara.
Ian M. Evans and Gwen Richards
All photos by Gwen Richards