Ardvreck Castle – A Ruin on Loch Assynt and Lunch by the Fire
A few hours.
The route
Ardvreck Castle is the broken tower of the MacLeods on a spit of land in Loch Assynt, with the hills of Assynt rising all round it.
It's a 5-minute walk out from the road to the ruin, and soup and homemade cake by the fire at the Elphin Tearooms are 15 minutes' drive south.
Before you go
The day
Assynt
Half an hour or so at the ruin on the shore of Loch Assynt, then down the road for lunch by the fire at Elphin.
About two and a half hoursAbout 0.5 miles on foot
Ardvreck Castle
An attraction
Ardvreck is beside the A837, the Lochinver road, just over a mile north-west of Inchnadamph. Park in the free car park beside the road, where boards tell the castle's story, and walk about 5 minutes out along the path to the ruin. The MacLeods built Ardvreck about five hundred years ago on a neck of land in the loch, and in 1650, the story goes, the royalist Marquis of Montrose was held here. Keep off its walls, keep children close by the water, and look at Calda House, the roofless mansion nearer the road, only from outside. There are no toilets here, and no shelter in the rain.
15 min by car
The Elphin Tearooms
Lunch
Lunch is 15 minutes' drive south, at the Elphin Tearooms beside the A835, a white cottage with its own big car park. Everything is homemade: soup, toasties, sandwiches and cakes, with sofas round a warm fire and picnic tables outside. Children, babies and dogs are welcome. It opens Sunday to Thursday, 11am to 4pm, until the end of October. If it's shut, the Ceilidh Place café in Ullapool, half an hour further south, serves food from noon.
If it rains
Ardvreck has no shelter, but it's only 5 minutes' walk each way: in heavy rain or a gale, look at the castle from the car park and go straight on to the fire at Elphin.
Worth a detour
- Knockan Crag
Knockan Crag is 2 miles south of Elphin, right beside the A835. The free reserve's car park has toilets, and the open-air Rock Room and the 20-minute Quarry Trail tell how older rock came to lie on top of younger here. It's beside the road, so stopping adds about a minute of driving and half an hour on foot.
Where to stay
Photograph by The Elphin Tearooms via Google