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Staying in Scotland – and not so far from last week’s layby on the A837 to Lochinver – another worthwhile stop-off on the west coast Rock Route designated by Scottish Natural Heritage, the Knockan Crag National Nature Reserve car park, near Elphin on the A835.

The Knockan Crag NNR is amazing. An unmanned visitor centre open all-hours, all-year with information and interactive displays on the landscape and geology of the area and two circular trails for different abilities, a car park and toilets. There are beautiful rock sculptures in the, frankly, prehistoric landscape and glorious views of Loch and Lochans stretching out at your feet. There are plenty of steps, but there's also a wheelchair/pushchair-friendly path to the Rock Room with its hands-on displays and touch-screen computer.

It's all in honour of tectonic forces that were strong enough to weld continents together, create the mountains and slide a huge block of ancient landscape dozens of kilometres over the top of younger rocks. All of that happened at Knockan Crag.

The Rock Room is a short, easy walk from the car park and it comes recommended.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

After almost two years’ absence, a welcome return to this feature on spotting the scenery with a cup of thermos tea by the roadside sees one of the most impressive, alien landscapes of Britain, around the hummocky plateau of Assynt in the top left-hand corner of Scotland.


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The Lewisian Gneiss here is between two and three billion years old and is all that survives in Britain of our Canadian connection, when this part of Scotland was also part of the ancient nucleus of North America. The policeman’s helmet mountain on the horizon is Suilven, about 4 miles to the south east of this layby and is made of comparatively young (only one billion-year-old) Torridonian sandstone.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

My monthly Countryfile magazine column, Reading the Landscape, now has a dedicated blog on this site. You will be able to find it, grouped with this blog, on the Home menu or save your mouse a trip to the top left-hand corner by clicking here: Reading the Landscape.

Reading the Landscape is a layperson’s guide to identifying the curious lumps and bumps, odd hummocks, ditches, landforms and buildings that can be found in the British countryside. It appears every month in the Month in the Country section of BBC Countryfile magazine and each instalment will appear here the month after. I may also add the odd extra thing I turn up in my travels around the British landscape.

Variations of this game have been popular on Facebook of late, so I thought I’d extend it to the BLC website as well as members of the Facebook BLC group.
All of the following pictures are taken from roughly the same place. Where is it?
Here are some clues:

• The place is on an island a short distance from the UK mainland.
• The first picture includes the tip of an island (in the foreground) off the coast of this island, with the UK mainland in the background.
• The island in the first picture has a romantic connection, but not to St Valentine.
• The lump of rock in the second picture is a particular kind of lava
• An indigenous mammal lives in the woods.

Tags: Landscapes

Arthur Cadman was Deputy Surveyor of the New Forest for most of the 1960s and dug this eponymous pool on Ocknell Plain, apparently for one reason only – to enhance the aesthetic appeal of this corner of the Forest. As you can see from the photograph, from some angles it’s setting in the landscape and construction is strongly suggestive of an upmarket hotel’s infinity pool, although there aren’t many of those that you’ll find an over-wintering goosander on.

We’re all used to reading about negative impacts and unforeseen consequences but, in this case, the Deputy Surveyor’s landscaping and good intentions failed to pave a road to Hell and the biodiversity around Cadman’s Pool proves it. Bird life in particular is amazing and is presumably supported by the local fauna and a thriving population of invertebrates. Anses Wood besides the Pool (below) is a great place to catch a brief glance of a Hawfinch, Firecrest, Crossbill or a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker (a bird that may as well be called a Never Spotted Woodpecker) if you’re extra patient and quite lucky.