This walk gives a potted taste of every landscape South Uist has to offer: moors, coast and the glorious machair – the coastal grassland that in high summer is transformed from a snooker-baize of smoothly uniform green to a canvass splashed with spectacular and multi-coloured flowers. Wildlife mirrors this changing scene: silent swans glide around the lochans and mires of the moors; by the coast oystercatchers zip back and forward, squealing pig-like in defence of their chicks in spring; while that bird of prey you thought you saw may just be a lapwing arcing through the skies, before spiralling in a corkscrew plummet to ground.
[1] From Loch Druidibeag car park on the B890 (NF790382), follow the track to the double gates marked ‘self-guided walk’. Climb over and follow a goat track by a fence for 150m to a gate on your left. Turn sharp right along the thin track. The path intermittently peters out, making the route tricky to describe. Head between the two raised mounds in front of you, keeping the houses on the skyline to the north-west in view. The track becomes more distinct as you cross the moor.
It can be tough going in wet weather (take care), but the landscape is a delight, as Lilliputian natural causeways and wafer-thin land bridges lightly tie the islets together here as if by a spider’s thread.
Pass through three gates to approach the houses (NF773386). Bear right between two of these houses to a gate marked ‘self-guided walk’ and the A865.
[2] Cross over and follow this track as it becomes a path to reach the coast. Turn south and follow the coastline for 2½km/1½ miles (if the tide’s out, the beach route also lets you work your way inland later).
Pack a clothes’ peg: low tide will also expose huge raised beds of – often stinking – seaweed. Until the 1960s, mattresses were made from seaweed, beds from driftwood. Seaweed is still cultivated today, including dulse (good with butter or as a broth) and carrageen – a delicate seaweed used for milk pudding.
[3] Pass the outcrop of Sgeir Dhreumasdail and continue to the inlet at Bun na Feathlach (NF752363). Here you walk inland to the remains of four ancient chapels and churches at How More, also known as Thoba Mor.
(A) The ruins are fragmented but are the most important Christian site in the Outer Hebrides, dating back more than 1,000 years.
Pick up the path heading north for Drimsdale.
This is a route known as the Machair Way or, in Gaelic, the more evocative sounding Utraid a Mhachaire. The mountains of Hecla and Ben Tarbert rise abruptly as a backdrop.
[4] The path is clear and the scene is one of undulating flatness, as if gentle waves are rolling along just under the soil. Continue past Lochs Stadhlaigearraidh and Groigearraidh to a crossroad of tracks (NF759398). Turn right and follow the track to Hopewell Cottage by the A865.
(B) The 1950s radar station sits conspicuously on the 285ft/87m hill of Ruabhal to the north, and this area is still occasionally used by the Ministry of Defence for live firing.
Cross over and follow the B890 back to the car park. Alternatively, the W17 bus stops at this junction.