Elphin

Croft Food at the Tearooms

The mutton in the farm shop at the Elphin Tearooms was raised in Elphin. Helen O'Keefe keeps a Shetland flock on the croft she took on with her mother, and the same animals supply the meat counter and the wool on the shelves. Before Elphin she rowed competitively in Australia and worked as a mining consultant; she won Scotland's Young Crofter of the Year. The tearoom sells homemade cakes and soups, toasties, coffee and a long run of teas, alongside pork and beef also raised in the township and a stand of local arts and crafts.

Inside there are sofas by a fireplace and a large off-road car park outside, with highchairs, a baby-changing table and outdoor tables when the weather allows. Dogs are welcome. It is a light-lunch stop.

Limestone Valley and Mountain Walks

Elphin sits directly on the A835, fourteen miles north of Ullapool, a scattered crofting township of around sixty people. The valley floor is green limestone, fertile and free of heather, which sets it apart from the mountain country pressing in on every side. Cùl Mòr rises above the settlement, an 849-metre Corbett reached by a stalkers' path from a lay-by near Knockan Crag before the ground turns wet and pathless; from the top the view runs over Suilven, Stac Pollaidh and a lochan-speckled landscape.

On the long crossing west to Lochinver, a nineteen-kilometre walk on paths and tracks past Cam Loch and Lochan Fada, Suilven shifts from a blunt Matterhorn-like end to a long ridge as you move around it. Closer to the village, a short and very boggy moorland route leads to Uamh an Tartair, the Cave of the Roaring, an unfenced pothole where the Abhainn a' Chnocain drops out of sight underground. Entry is for expert cavers only.

Water, Caves and Deep Time

The limestone is the reason for much of this. Water vanishes into fissures and reappears at springs, and around the Bone Caves it feeds a green sward of mountain avens, yellow saxifrage and lady's mantle. The caves, reached by a clear path up the Allt nan Uamh past a waterfall, have given up the bones of wolf, bear, lynx, Arctic fox and reindeer, along with human remains and a walrus-ivory pin roughly two thousand years old. The path narrows and steepens at the end, and the caves are now protected ground that must not be dug.

Reading the Moine Thrust

Four and a half kilometres south, Knockan Crag makes a good outing for a short visit or a wet day. Its trails, the shortest about twenty minutes, interpret the Moine Thrust, where in 1882 Ben Peach and John Horne worked out how older rock had been pushed bodily over younger strata and settled a long argument about how the Highlands were made. There is a turf-roofed rock room open to the weather, poetry and sculpture along the paths, picnic tables and toilets. The path to the Rock Room itself is a short, gentle climb; the trails higher up are steeper.

The Vanished Church and Sparse Bus

The village had a tin church once, a corrugated-iron building of 1908 that stood by the road until it was judged dangerous and taken down in 2005. There is no railway; the Rapsons 809 bus is the link to Ullapool, Inchnadamph and Lochinver, and it runs seldom enough that you should check the times before depending on it. What remains is the working landscape and the people on it. Helen O'Keefe, who set up a croft food hub called The Green Bowl with her neighbour Tessa Dorrian, described the village year in 2021 as a Burns supper, a Christmas party, curry nights and something called Elphin chicken day.