Laxford Bridge N and S

[TheTortoise]

I mostly just post Graham reports on WalkHighlands but couldn't find any mention online of this walk so thought I would blog it too. After 2 days of hillwalking, and a rather uncertain forecast, we decided to take things easy and walk along beside the Laxford river. Here's our outward route.

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The paths are as shown on the OS map - complete path from Loch Stack Lodge to Laxford Bridge on the east side, 3 footbridges along this section, no path to start off with on the west side, but then good until the most southerly bridge, when it stops again. There is also an excellent path on the west side going out to Traigh Bad na Baigne, after Laxford Bridge. One can therefore mix and match as much or as little as you like, choose your starting point, choose which bridges to cross and how far to go. This is a lovely route, ideal for a day with a low midge forecast. The combination of the river, some trees, some crags and views of the hills are superb.
We were camped at the carpark near Lone, so drove a little distance up the road and started at Loch Stack Lodge. You do have to go in the gate of the lodge and immediately skirt the lawn to a good path below the house. This feels like invading curtilage but there were no forbidding signs and I'm not sure how often the lodge is occupied. We walked along the east side. We admired our route up Ben Stack from the north.

Looking to Ben Stack from the middle footbridge

We continued on this side to Laxford Bridge , crossed the bridge and headed out beside the river.

Lots of pink

Looking out to sea

We had lunch at the end of the path by the bay.Then we returned to Laxford Bridge, crossed over and headed back down the east side to the first footbridge, then went down the west side.

Not quite so sunny on the way back, we are about to get a little wet

At the last footbridge we crossed back to the east side to get back to the start.

Brighter again, looking down Loch Stack

The midges were just coming out for the first time on our 3-day trip, and the forecast was for unsettled weather, so we headed back to civilisation. We hadn't done 2 of our planned Grahams, but had gone up Arkle instead and tried out this river walk, giving 3 varied and superb days with scarcely any driving between walks. But we had run out of food, since the original plan had us going past shops. And there are now significantly less ticks in the area, I brought quite a lot away, possibly collected on this walk which I did without gaiters. It made me wonder my tick (hill) to tick (beastie) ratio is in summer.