The long narrow road to Dornoch.

I said in an earlier posting that the Altnaharra Caravan Club Site, by the shores of Loch Naver below the clearance village of Grummore was in the middle of nowhere. And so it is. This means that if you want to have a day of shopping you have to be prepared for a bit of a drive. This is, however, not a bad thing because while you will have a long way to go, the landscape you will be driving through is so gorgeous you won't want it to stop.

So it was that when we set out for a day in the coastal town of Dornoch we chose not to take the "quick" route through Lairg and Bonar Bridge, but the "scenic" route via Syre and Helmsdale. You might want to grab a coffee. This will be a longer than usual post, because it is rather a long way...

We left the site and turned right, away from Altnaharra and head in a roughly northerly direction towards the little settlement of Syre. At first the road follows the lochside, and then from the end of the loch it runs along the western bank of the River Naver as it flows relentlessly towards Bettyhill, the north coast, and the sea. As you drive you will pass first the clearance village of Grumbeg - which is also the site of a neolithic chambered cairn - and then the memorial to Donald Macleod, a resident of the cleared village of Rossall, on the opposite side of the river.

In 1857, some years after the clearance, he wrote his experiences up in a series for the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle. Under the title "Gloomy Memories" these reminiscences were later collected into a book which remains one of the primary sources on the clearances. You can't actually see Rossall from the memorial as it is now obscured by commercial forestry, but we'll come back to it, and to Macleod later.

At around about this point there's also a sign informing motorists that this is now an experimental road surface for timber lorries, and thanking us for our cooperation. Now, we've been driving around this area on and off for more than five years. The sign has always been here, as have the massive timber lorries which hurtle along the narrow roads with careless abandon. In all of that time we've never been able to discern anything experimental about the bog standard tarmac road surface, or managed to work out exactly what it is we've been cooperating with.

After about six miles or so you arrive in the little settlement - I'm going to suggest it's too small to be accurately described as a village - of Syre. There's a little car parking area on your right here, and it's worth pausing for a while to take a look at the church. This neat and tidy little black and white corrugated iron building was constructed in 1901. It was essentially a pre-fab flat pack designed by Spiers and Co. of Glasgow and still hosts services on the second, fourth and fifth Sunday's of the month.

For ourselves myself and Mrs Snail are not church goers, but that doesn't prevent us from appreciating a good church. This little building exudes a sense of calm and tranquillity - a sense that is heightened as you venture inside. The walls are wood lined and white painted, the ceiling a soft sky blue and the pews simple stripped pine. It's surprisingly quiet considering you're sitting inside what is basically a big metal box - although I confess I've never been in there during a hail storm. It's a wonderful little nugget of peace, and I commend it to you.

At the start of the twentieth century people were beginning to move back into Strathnaver after the clearances seventy five years earlier- hence the need for a new church. New crofts were established, but the new settlers hardly had a chance to establish themselves before their young men - so vital on a working croft - were taken by the carnage of Ypre, Paschendale and the Somme, a second tragedy for the valley attested to by the war memorial which stands outside the church.

Behind the church is the house built by Patrick Sellar -who you may remember from the last post as the one time Factor for the Duke of Sutherland and overseer of the Strathnaver clearances, although according to the guidebooks it's been extended and renovated to a point where the man himself wouldn't recognise it.

We need to move on though - turning right just past the church, across the bridge over the River Naver.  If you've set off early and have plenty of time, you might want to turn right again as soon as you hit the opposite shore and take a little detour down the Forestry Commission track. This does mean you're going back on yourself, but if you've developed an interest in the valley - and trust me, you will - there are a couple of things down here that you'll want to see. There's a car park about half a mile down the track, and you'll be on foot from here. Trust me - take a deep breath and stride out into the forest gloom.

You're actually only going to be walking a shade over a mile, but I'm afraid because of your surroundings it will feel like more. don't get me wrong - I really like trees. There are few things I like more than wandering through a forest, the sun streaming through the canopy; dappled shed an fresh, chlorophyll green light. But this isn't that kind of forest. This is a Forestry Commission commercial forest, which means regimented lines of close planted dark green conifers, all standing straighter than a Buckingham Palace guard reaching ever upwards towards an invisible sky. You can't see anything to the side of the track, and you can't see beyond the next bend.

It's like being stuck inside a dark green bubble and you'll be relieved when you get to the little sign that directs you to the left, off the track, and into the lost village of Rossall. You are now more or less opposite the Donald Macleod memorial we passed earlier, although obviously you can't see it because of the trees.

Because of Macleod's book Rossall is probably the most well known of Strathnaver's cleared settlements, and the Forestry Commission has done an excellent job of preserving what's left and providing clear, comprehensive information about what you're actually looking at as you walk through the ruins.

There are the remains of forty seven buildings here, longhouses, outbuildings and kilns for the drying of corn. The settlement is spread across a small hillock, at the summit of which is yet more evidence that human occupation of this valley extends back into more ancient times. The Bronze Age burial mound which sits atop the hill isn't immediately obvious, and I confess I might well have missed it had we not been in possession of the excellent little book "What to see in Strathnaver: A guide to local history and Archaeology" by Kevin O'Reilly and Ashley Crockford which we picked up from the information centre in Bettyhill a couple of years ago.

Rather more obvious evidence of ancient occupation can be found if you leave Rossall, return to the Forestry Commission track and head about a mile and a half further on down. Be warned - it will feel very much like walking through a painting by MC Esher, the track does seem endless beneath the miserable conifer canopy where the sun does not shine and the birds seem not to sing, but you will be rewarded at the end of it with Clach an Righ, a small circle of standing stones.

In common with so many of the standing stone monuments in the north of Scotland, there is a refreshing lack of barriers here. If you've ever been to Stonehenge on Sailsbury Plain you'll know that you can't get within twenty feet of the stones. Now, while I confess that Clach an Righ is a lot less spectacular than Stonehenge, there is nothing stopping you getting up close and personal with the monument and feeling the history which radiates from the rock.

The legend is that this circle - about twenty two feet across - it's slender stones protruding snaggle toothed from the scrubby ground was raised to commemorate the Battle of Dalharrold, between Scots and Norsemen at the tail end of the Twelfth Century. Given that people of that time were not given to arranging rocks in circles such an explanation is clearly nonsense, and indeed the archaeology suggests that the stones are significantly older.

How old is a matter of some speculation, but it could easily date back to 2000BC*, meaning that this little circle of stones could pre-date the Broch mentioned in the last post by as much as two thousand years, and suggest that there have been people in the Strath for four millennia. The purpose of these circles is unknown, although the presence of a small cairn within the ring points to the possibility of a burial here.

If you've walked all this way though, you'll realise as we did that however fascinating is is to commune with the ancients, time will be getting on, it's a long walk back to the car and you'd better get a shift on if you're going to get to Dornoch by lunchtime. For the sake of brevity, and because it's a hideous walk I choose not to think too much about, I'll omit any description of the two and a half mile trudge back to the car and instead leap forward to skimming across an almost deserted landscape along the single track road** which will lead us eventually to the eastern coast of Scotland.

You're a few miles down the road before you come to the first landmark, the The Garvault Hotel, which claims - with some justification - to be the most remote hotel in mainland Britain. We've never visited, what with hotels not being our thing, but I can confirm that it is truly in the middle of nowhere, and that it is set in the middle of an empty and dramatic landscape. Indeed, it's gone the extra mile in terms of isolation by being set at least half a mile back from the road. The place has always appeared deserted, but then I guess that's the point.

A few miles further on you start tom come across isolated farms and the landscape begins to change subtley. The orange and russets of moorland begin to give way to greener, grassier, more rolling hills - particularly once you take a hard right hand turn onto the A897 at the little village of Kinbrace. (A left hand turn here will take you to the wonderful Forsinard Flows, about which more at some time in the future.) You'll notice more trees, of a more deciduous nature and for the most part you find yourself at a much lower altitude, no longer looking down on the river at the bottom of the valley but driving at more or less the same level as the fly fishermen standing up to their waists in their quest to land the biggest salmon.

You have to drive with a little extra caution around here. It's easy to get used to the wide open spaces where you can see for miles ahead and - even on these single track roads - you can belt along at a pretty fair old clip. As you get closer to the East Coast the proliferation of trees makes it much harder to see what's coming. While it's true that there aren't all that many cars on the road, there are some, and besides cars aren't the only thing you might meet on the road.

Red Deer are remarkably prolific in this neck of the woods and for some reason up on the moors where you can see them easily they stay well away from the road but as soon as you get a lot of trees to obscure your view they come right up to the road. Maybe they're all car spotters, I dunno. Still, a bit of cautious driving means you stand an excellent chance of getting a really close up view, while being profligate with your speed makes it rather likely you'll hit one - and you wouldn't want to do that. Really, you'd feel bad about it. Besides, have you seen them? Adult Red Deer are huge! Hit one in anything smaller than a tank and you're definitely going to write off your car.

Finally you drive over the Kildonan Beck, where there is a helpful display of information about the gold rush of 1869. Everything here is green and peaceful now, but back in the latter half of the nineteenth century this section of the Helmsdale valley was occupied by a dense little shanty town known as "Baile an Or" in Gaelic - "Village of the Gold" in English. There still is gold in these thar hills, and you can still pan for it. (There are rules though, so a little research is required before you start.) You're unlikely to get rich, but there is a heart warming story in the Timespan Museum in Helmsdale about a bloke who panned the stream for years until he had enough gold to make a wedding ring.

Then, suddenly, you're in Helmsdale. The town just seems to suddenly appear - the single track road broadens out to the more standard two lane arrangement and ordinary suburban houses on either side of the road. After such a long drive through such emptiness Helmsdale feels like a major conurbation, although it really is - by Southern standards at least - quite tiny. It's a pleasant little place, but one I won't describe now because we'll be back in the not too distant future.

From here we pointed the car south on the A9 - one of the few A roads in this neck of the woods which isn't single track, and consequently feels a bit like a motorway - through the towns of Brora and Golspie towards Dornoch and much more importantly, lunch.

About which, more soon.

*Or BCE is you prefer more PC dating.

**Not that the road being single track is remarkable in any way - all the roads are single track around here.