Horse Island

Horse Island lies in the Summer Isles off the northwest coast of Scotland. It is a low, uninhabited island of grass and rock, separated from the Coigach peninsula by the narrow Horse Sound. Across the sound stand the villages of Achiltibuie, Badenscaillie and Polglass, while the bulk of Ben More Coigach rises behind them. The island is in fact two islands: the larger southern main island and the smaller northern Meall nan Gabhar, joined at low tide by a 60-metre neck of sand and rock. A low cairn marks Sgùrr nan Uan, the highest point at 60 metres on the main island’s southeast ridge. The island’s geology tells an ancient story. Most of the north and part of the south rest on Archaean polymetamorphic gneiss cut by Scourie dyke amphibolite veins trending northwest. The southern two-thirds of the main island are built of red sandstones and breccias of the Stoer Group, tilted gently west-northwest. Wave action has carved caves and arches into these softer rocks, such as South East Cave and Horse Island Arch, which draw sea kayakers to explore their twisting passages. A small reef, Iolla Mhòr, guards the southern tip. Horse Island’s isolation has preserved a mosaic of undisturbed grassland, heather, mosses, cotton grasses and lichens, with wildflowers blooming in summer. Only low drystone walls remain, built long ago to shelter sheep that no longer graze here. Gulls wheel above the cliffs and the surrounding waters form part of the Wester Ross Marine Protected Area. Wild goats now wander the slopes, descendants of animals once kept by the island’s early 19th-century inhabitants, whose roofless cottages were recorded in surveys of the time.