Walk Telford's grid of streets between the shore and the hill

Watch the Stornoway ferry come in at the pier

Walk out along the shore of Loch Broom towards Rhue

Ullapool was laid out in 1788 by the British Fisheries Society to a design by Thomas Telford, turning a hamlet of twenty-odd households on the east shore of Loch Broom into a herring port. It is still a fishing harbour and a yacht haven, and the Stornoway ferry has run from here since the terminal opened in the 1970s, 43 miles across the Minch.

Ullapool: Telford's Herring Port on Loch Broom

Ullapool

The North Coast 500 as a loop from Inverness: dolphins off Chanonry Point, the cliffs of Duncansby and Dunnet Head, Smoo Cave and Sandwood Bay, Handa's seabirds and Suilven, then the Bealach na Bà and Culloden.

The North Coast 500

Walk the geological trail at Knockan Crag National Nature Reserve to see the Moine Thrust, where Ben Peach and John Horne showed in the 1880s that older rocks had been pushed some 70km over younger ones

Visit the interpretation centre at Knockan Crag, in the North West Highlands Geopark

Find the artworks on the trail, Joe Smith's The Globe and Susheila Jamieson's Pipeworm

At Knockan Crag, Ben Peach and John Horne showed in the 1880s that older rocks had been pushed some 70km over younger ones along what is now called the Moine Thrust — one of the first thrust belts ever recognised and a milestone in the history of geology, set out in full in their memoir of 1907. The crag sits in the North West Highlands Geopark, and the Lewisian gneiss to the west is up to 3,000 million years old.

Knockan Crag: The Moine Thrust

Walk the circuit path round the hill from the road

Climb to the summit ridge of Torridonian sandstone

Look out over the Inverpolly Forest to Suilven and the Minch

Pick out the pinnacles weathered when this was a nunatak above the ice

Stac Pollaidh is small enough to climb in a morning, and its pinnacles are rated in Scotland second only to the Quiraing's on Skye: a crest of Torridonian sandstone just over 610m high, broken into pinnacles and gullies, with smooth scoured flanks. That shape is the record of the last Ice Age — the ridge stood out above the ice sheet as a nunatak and was weathered into spikes while the ice ground the sides smooth beneath it. The path splits about 200m from the road and both branches meet round the back.

Stac Pollaidh: The Little Mountain With the Big Views

Cross Fowler's suspension bridge over the gorge

Look up at the 46m Falls of Measach from the viewing platform

Walk the woodland trail along the rim of the gorge

Corrieshalloch is a gorge 1.5km long and 60m deep but only about 10m wide at the lip, cut by meltwater at the end of the last ice age along lines of weakness in the Moine rock. The Falls of Measach drop 46m into it, seen from a Victorian suspension footbridge built by Sir John Fowler, one of the designers of the Forth Bridge, and from a viewing platform further down. At 7 hectares it is the smallest of Scotland's national nature reserves.

Corrieshalloch Gorge and the Falls of Measach

Walk in from Lochinver towards Suilven across the Assynt moor

Climb to the bealach and on to Caisteal Liath if the weather holds

Watch the boats land at Lochinver harbour

Suilven is a steep-sided ridge about two kilometres long, Torridonian sandstone sitting on a landscape of Lewisian gneiss, and its blunt north-west end, Caisteal Liath, the 'Grey Castle', is the shape that makes the skyline of Assynt. The usual route starts from the Glencanisp Lodge track outside Lochinver, and the walk in across the moor is long before the climb even starts. Lochinver itself is a working fishing harbour, with the white sand of Achmelvich a few miles north.

Lochinver and Suilven: The Sugar Loaf of Assynt

Walk the walled and woodland gardens at Inverewe

Look across Loch Ewe from the garden viewpoint

Osgood Mackenzie began Inverewe in 1862 on barren ground on the shore of Loch Ewe, sheltering it with pines until exotic plants would grow; the garden now covers about 20 hectares with more than 2,500 kinds of exotic plants, and his daughter Mairi Sawyer gave it to the National Trust for Scotland in 1952 with an endowment. Down the coast, Gairloch has beaches, a harbour and Gairloch Museum, which reopened in 2019 in a former Cold War operations room.

Gairloch and Inverewe: The Garden Made from Bare Ground

Walk out to the ruin of Ardvreck Castle on its promontory

Look along Loch Assynt from the castle shore

Walk up to the Bone Caves on the flank of Breabag, south of Inchnadamph

Ardvreck stands ruined on a promontory in Loch Assynt, built about 1490 by the MacLeods of Assynt to replace the older Assynt Castle. The limestone country around Inchnadamph is riddled with caves and swallow holes, and the Bone Caves on the western flank of Breabag have given up the remains of lynx, brown bear, arctic fox and reindeer dated to 47,000 BCE, the only evidence of polar bear yet found in Scotland, and human skeletons from the 3rd millennium BCE.

Assynt: Ardvreck Castle and the Bone Caves

Drive the hairpins of the Bealach na Bà from Tornapress to the summit

Stop at the top for the view west over Raasay and Skye

Drop down to Applecross village on the far side

Come back by the coast road towards Shieldaig, opened in 1975

The Bealach na Bà, the 'pass of the cattle', was begun in 1818 and finished in September 1822 by John Reid & Son of Edinburgh, and it is engineered like an Alpine pass, with tight hairpins and gradients approaching 20%. It has the greatest ascent of any road climb in the United Kingdom, rising from sea level at Applecross to 626m in about six kilometres, and is the third highest mountain pass in Scotland. Applecross itself — A' Chomraich, 'the sanctuary', where the Irish monk Maelrubha founded a monastery — was reachable only by boat until the 19th century, and the coast road round the peninsula to Shieldaig and Torridon was not built until 1975.