Undiscovered Scotland

 

Poolewe's main street forms the start of the single track B8057, which runs for about eight miles north along the west shore of Loch Ewe to its terminus at the mouth of the loch.

En route the road passes through a series of small crofting townships such as Naast, Brae, Midtown, Mellangaun and Cove. The focus of settlement is about half way along the road, at Brae and Midtown, which the Ordnance Survey refers to collectively as Inverasdale: hence the title of this page.

This coastline is a mixture of rocky shorelines interspersed with sandy bays, the best of the latter being a little to the north of Inverasdale. It gives the impression of being less remote and wild than the coastlines between Gairloch and Melvaig and along the road to Redpoint.

This may be no more than an illusion caused because those coasts face out to sea, while the views here are all across Loch Ewe. The views here are no less spectacular for it.

Rubha nan Sasan, beyond Cove is home to a range of WWII command posts and gun emplacements. These helped guard the entrance to Loch Ewe during the war, when it served as an assembly point for Arctic convoys bound for Murmansk. The wartime role of Loch Ewe and those who lost their lives sailing from here was commemorated by a memorial stone unveiled at Cove in 1999.

And, unlikely as it seems, Inverasdale has a link with another stone, the Stone of Destiny. One of the Glasgow students who stole the stone from Westminster Abbey in 1950 was originally from Inverasdale. And although the Stone was later returned - it was symbolically left at Arbroath Abbey draped in a Saltire - some maintain that the original was hidden, and what was returned was a copy. It is certainly thought that the Stone of Destiny did spend some time during its disappearance at a tractor repair shed at Firemore, north of Inverasdale.