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

Assynt

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 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

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

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

Cross the Kylesku Bridge and stop to look at its curve from the shore

Find where the old ferry crossed before 1984

Take the boat from Kylesku to Loch Beag to see Eas a' Chual Aluinn

Walk to the falls across the moor from the road south of Kylesku

The Kylesku Bridge, a curved concrete box girder over the narrow strait between Loch Glencoul and Loch a' Chàirn Bhàin, opened in July 1984 and replaced the ferry that had crossed about 400 metres to the east; the Queen formally opened it on 8 August. Up Loch Glencoul, Eas a' Chual Aluinn falls 200 metres, the tallest waterfall in the United Kingdom. You can walk to the top of it — about six miles there and back on a rough path across boggy ground from the road south of Kylesku — or, in good weather, take the boat from the slipway by the Kylesku Hotel to Loch Beag and see it from the water.

Kylesku: The Curved Bridge and Britain's Tallest Waterfall

Take the ferry from Tarbet across to Handa

Walk the boardwalk circuit round the island to the Great Stack

Count razorbills and guillemots on the cliffs

Watch great skuas over the moor on the way back

Handa is a Scottish Wildlife Trust reserve off the Sutherland coast, reached by a small ferry from Tarbet. Its Torridonian sandstone cliffs hold one of the UK's largest guillemot colonies and an internationally important colony of razorbills, along with puffins, fulmars, kittiwakes and great skuas that nest on the moorland behind.

Handa Island: Razorbills, Guillemots and Great Skuas

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

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.