It isn’t catching my first brown trout that I’ll remember best. It isn’t the otherworldly cragscapes. It isn’t the birdsong or the convivial evenings in the local harbour bar. It is a single distant view across a serene loch.
I was sitting in a rowing boat far out in the water when I spotted snake-like heads above bejewelled necks: three majestic divers patrolling like ships of war. Something about their primordial poise, their utter sense of belonging set against the rugged, distant loch shore is fixed in my memory.
They were black-throated divers, birds I had never seen before. In a landscape I have long dreamed about but that had taken me almost 50 years to get around to visiting.
It was my friend Gavin who signed me up for adventure in Assynt. He is a fly fisherman and seeker of places far from human bustle. Much delayed by Covid, I finally made it there, arriving on a June evening. The last two hours of road, from Inverness to Lochinver, over firth, through forest, under mountain crag and, finally, along the shores of presenter’s fantasy.
