Down by the Dornoch firth we met the A9, not a great deal of traffic came along as the new bridge over the firth takes much of the northbound vehicles. We were glad however to arrive at Bonar Bridge, where we called in at the tourist information office to ask about campsite and cafes in the area, as we thought the next camp site was at Lairg .. too far for us, but the good news was that a cafe was just a few hundred yards away over the bridge. Here we had lunch and a good long rest. We heard the weather forecast on the cafe radio.... Dry in the east, wet in the west, we were going up the middle. We left Bonar in sunshine but before long heavy rain came in from the west forcing us to don our waterproofs again, This had been the pattern. Into waterproofs for a shower then leaving them on as there was often rain about if not actually raining.
We had hoped to camp at Invershin but the farm no longer accepted campers, we decided the B road up the west of the river Shin might provide us with the chance to break off into the woods and find a quiet place but things were not encouraging, it was a very narrow B road hemmed in by trees with no chance of breaking off into the wood or down to the river on our right. Worse still it was very busy with tourists visiting the falls of shin a popular place for watching the salmon leaping at this time of the year.

It was raining gently and was very dark and gloomy and with no sign of a camp site things were not too good. By this time we had walked about sixteen miles but Lairg (official camp site) was a further six miles away.

Things looked glum, but a few hundred yards further we found an overgrown track leading steeply up into the trees, this led us into an old quarry probably used to supply the stone for the road that we had been following. Here in the quarry we were out of the wind and out of sight of the road although it was only a hundred yards away below us, This was as good as we were liable to find and turned out to be a good camp. We sat out and cooked supper as the rain had stopped, with a few smoke coils burning to keep the midges at bay we were quite comfortable but turned in at dusk.

 

 
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