Day 2 – around an hour from Fort William

We wake up to to a few mountains letting us know we’re nearly at the scenic bit.

We’ve had the heating on full wack all night so it was pretty warm but neither of us slept that well so we’re up about 6 o clock. On holiday. We make some breakfast and then set off to get some shopping in for the upcoming week.
It turns out to be an absolutely gorgeous day.
We’ve done our shop and after packing the van cupboards in a way that will probably be infuriating later. A T25 parks up next to us in Morrisons and the guy comes over for a chat, he’s from Skye and recommends that we go there as apparently this is a good time of year for it. We then get ready to find a nice place for walk and set off down dead end road just outside of Fort William to the tiny hamlet of Clunes. This is a gorgeous spot as you can see.

We have borrowed a large selection of OS maps and as we’re still a bit too far south for the walking books we have, we go for a bit of a tour of the area based on the map. Unfortunately, forestry commission appears to have totally destroyed the footpath as we get about a quarter of the way round, but as we are both more stubborn than sensible, we start picking our way across the hill to the waterfall we said we were going to look at. And here it is:

We reckon that as the next section is still wooded we can pick up the footpath the other side. This is not the case and we follow a random animal trail instead that ends up back on a proper track eventually. Following this down to the road, we then cross over and go through Achnacarry Estate and past a museum that I can’t imagine it is financially viable to pay someone to staff.

Heading through the estate.

Then through another wooded section to rejoin the road and head back to the van.

We then have a rather epic fire on the shores of the imaginatively named Loch Lochy, which started reasonably…

and then escalated.

We cook a recipe featuring poppadums and halloumi, Lee gets a bit stressed at the cooking setup but tastes pretty good. Not bad for the second time we’ve ever cooked in the van.