Up nice and early this morning to be back at Tarbet by 9am to get the boat across to Handa Island. The walk around the island was about 6 km, mainly across moor country. When we arrived there was a short talk by a volunteer on where to find particular birds etc and the history of the island.
We first came to some old ruins (a settlement of 60 folk in eight families who lived on the island until the great potato famine of 1847. Across the island, we saw Great Skuas and Arctic Skuas (much rarer) before we got to the cliffs (but no Red Grouse) on the northern and western side of the islands.
Here we saw Kittiwakes, Razorbills and Gillemots (also fairly rare) and what we had really come for, puffins. You could see their little orange feet and beaks. The Scottish variety are fairly small (no more than 30cm high) but what amazed us was how well they could fly. Hadn’t thought that about puffins. There were thousands of sea birds right around the cliffs.
Caught the boat back and after some quick lunch, (hot smoked mackerel and salad at the café) we were on our way south.
Called in at Ullapool for a coffee where there is a ferry that goes to Ireland. Grabbed some fish and chips to eat on the road so that we could push on to Gairloch. Very scenic along this coastline with the road winding along and around bays, lochs and inlets. Also saw our first deer. The lady in the information centre at Ullapool told us that the reason we had not seen any was that there was plenty of food for them in the hills during the summer.
The weather is pretty bleak (11 degrees outside) at Gairloch although we did go for a walk around town. Internet access here so we could get the blog pretty well up to date.
