Stac Pollaidh, Highlands - Coigach's "Little Mountain"

No photographs can fully prepare you for the stark beauty of Scotland’s far northwest. Rising from a maze of lochans and knobbly rock outcrops, the region’s mountains possess a surreal quality that owes as much to the other-wordly emptiness of their surroundings as the suddenness with which they rise from them. Quinag, Suilven, Canisp, Cul Mor and Cul Beag … each of these colossal lumps of ice smoothed sandstone have an instantly recognizable shape. One, however, gets considerably more attention than all the rest. It’s not so much its spiky-topped ridge, nor even its diminutive height, that explain the popularity of Stac Pollaidh –“Peak of the Peat Moss”.

Stac Pollaidh’s serrated cap separates Loch Lugainn and Loch Sionascaig, on the broad peninsula of Coigach, to the north of Ullapool. The mountain and its larger siblings have long fascinated geologists. Comprised of chocolate-red sandstone, they rest on a bedrock of Lewissian Gneiss, formed 1500 million years ago, and one of the oldest known rocks in the world. Completing the geological picture is the layer of limestone lining some of the area’s larger glens, where fossils of reindeer and wolves have been discovered, and vestiges of polar bear found in hidden caves. Nearby Knockan Crag  5km/3miles past the turning for Stac Poillaidh/Achiltibuie on the A835, was the focus of much scholarly debate in the late nineteenth century. Schists encrusting the clifftop here seemed much older than the limestones lower down, but it wasn’t until 1907 that the puzzle of their origin was finally solved. Knockan was found to lie on the socalled “Moine thrust fault” along which tectonic plate movement had displaced whole layers of rock, forcing them upwards and sideways. An interpretative centre perched just above the main road, complete with a turf-roof rock room and sculpture trail, tells the story of this conceptual breakthrough, showing how ice and erosion also played their part in shaping the region’s distinctive landforms. The climate of the northwest has seen some dramatic fluctuations since the last ice age. Pollen identified in the sediment at the bottom of a loch next to Stac Pollaidh suggests that around 4200 years ago a sudden rise in temperature, accompanied by the onset of much windier and wetterweather, resulted in the disappearance ofthe pine forest that once carpeted the whole region. Today, it’s hard to imagine the vast expanse of peat bog and bare rock covered in trees, and still harder to picture it dotted with little villages. But this rough terrain was once home to a thriving community of Gaelic-speaking herders and subsistence farmers, who livedin tiny sod-and-stone huts, rearing goats and black cattle. Huddled together in clachans(townships), they supplemented their diet with herring, a hardy strain of oats and, later, crops of potatoes.

Terrain: Well made pitched paths, uneven in places, with sustained ascents/descents and a very steep climb to reach the summit ridge.

This route originally appeared as walk number 34 in Walk Britain - Great Views in 2009 and was checked at that time by Inverness Ramblers.