Ulva - two sandwiches, three if it's been raining

Ulva packs a lot into 7.5 miles by 4 miles. 

It is community owned, following a buyout in 2018; one of the few places where the land is owned by its people. This is historically important, because Ulva was subjected to one of the most brutal of the Clearances in the 19^th century, with a population of several hundred people reduced to around 50. Finally, the tenants of the land have some control over it.

The landscape, as with so much of the Highlands and Islands, is dotted with the signs of abandoned homes. Ruined stonebuilt walls- giving the lie to press stories that the highlanders were living in crude hovels. And even where those are long gone, look out for patches of greener land and in particular bracken. Bracken will only grow in well drained soils – in most of the highlands that means someone drained it, long ago. The ridges made by rigs are often visible too.

Ulva is reached by about the most charming form of transport imaginable. You park your car in the car park (apparently there’s a pre-bookable bus) and head down to the ferry jetty, where you flip a sign. The sign is then a red square, visible from Ulva, and the ferry crosses to fetch you. Your return journey is basically a case of finding the ferryman in the booth. It’s a tiny boat, that you have to step into, and I don’t know what arrangements could be made if you have mobility needs. Also, check its running before you go – they have social media.

The walk we went on was probably a two sandwich walk – it might gain a half sandwich for general bogginess. You will want boots.

Rough terrain, bogginess, but good toilets at the beginning/end of the walk.

For once the estimates aren’t too far off – I’m fairly sure it took us about 4 hours, although we skipped the actual cave because we were worried about missing the last ferry off the island.

Very quickly after leaving the jetty and the café behind, you’re into what feels like the back of beyond. Follow the sign for the Livingston Walk with the shore behind you, bending roughly uphill through a little wood. We watched some buzzards wheeling for a while here, and found the dam which supplies Ulva’s drinking water. The path keeps going up through a wood and past some deer fencing, until it opens out onto a farm road.

This was the first of the real bogs, and I got fairly sick of hauling the smallest one out of mud dubs. She had an unerring knack of looking at the dry bit, looking at the bit that would suck her in up to her knee, and choosing that one. This slowed us down enough where even my usually chilled out husband was getting nippy about time.

And this is where we met the Highland Cows. There is a large herd of Highland Cows up on the track, and they are wonderful. But it’s always worth being wary of something that large, with such huge horns, and a known tendency to get anxious if you are anywhere near their calves.

The first bit of advice is that if you can avoid a field with cows and calves, do. Unfortunately, this one was not avoidable. The next piece of advice is keep your distance, and never get between the cows and their calves. Move calmly, quietly, and with confidence and not – if you can help it – radiating the level of low key terror my son was radiating by this point.

Walking the children as carefully, calmly, quietly, and unobtrusively as we could up the field margin worked perfectly well, although the calves were clustered behind the cows and there was a fair bit of what you could describe as cow chatter until they were confident we weren’t about to try to hug the babies. However beautiful they are.

The path then bends round – still signposted – and goes down a steep, boggy slope alongside a stream. At this point, the youngest decided she hated all known sandwiches. This is not an easy thing to manage at the midpoint of a hike.

After an extended bickering match about how if you are hungry, you should eat the sandwich, you liked it yesterday, we emerged from the woods and found the cottage reputed to belong to David Livingston’s grandparents. Now, if you are younger than me, you’ll probably be thinking, who? People stopped teaching about how Britain charged around Africa pretending to be all civilised at people, and certainly stopped pretending it was heroic. But Livingston was famous for a solid century and a half – doctor, explorer, and colonialist missionary, yes, but also staunch abolitionist.  Husband and I have bickered over whether the one outweighs the other - husband is a doctor who worked in Malawi, where he tells me the abolitionism is the bit that’s recalled.

Brief political aside over, we headed for the cottages. Luckily, they’re well signposted, although the little monument in the cottage ruin is a little overgrown.

Moving on, look out for the marker posts. Some of them are a bit knocked over, but they give you a good guide for crossing the very boggy land here. There is a cave, which sounded fascinating, but we missed that past and were too tight for time to go back.

The path heads back up from the shore and through a tangled hazel wood. After a while the path bends back towards the shorter paths like the woodland walk and back towards the jetty.