A Loch on Hikes

* * *

It was almost sunset when we dropped down into Glen Torridon, the mountains going dark, the air heavy with the sweet smell of unpolluted streams and thick vegetation.

"It's so glacial," said Marybeth. And it was. We could feel the forces that scoured out the broad valley and sculpted the mountains, which once were as tall as the Alps.

At the head of Loch Torridon was our home for the week, Stalker's Cottage, a single-story white stuccoed 19th-century farmhouse on the original Torridon House Estate. It's one of more than 50 properties available for rent through the National Trust for Scotland, with prices ranging from about $265 to $3,100. Accommodations include cottages, castles, manor houses, the former gatehouse to a monastery, author Thomas Carlyle's birthplace and several lighthouses.

The key to Stalker's was in the door when we arrived, so we let ourselves in like Goldilocks. And like Goldilocks, we felt as if we'd walked into someone else's home. Until we made it ours with a fire and supper eaten in its glow, we half expected the owners to burst through the door and demand an explanation.

Marybeth and I had fortunately stopped in nearby Locharron to provision ourselves for a few days, suspecting -- correctly -- that Torridon wasn't going to offer much shopping opportunity. Locharron had one grocery store where we bought some essentials and a very fine whiskey, a 10-year-old Ardbeg from the Isle of Islay just offshore from Glasgow.

The next morning I was awakened by rough barking. When I opened my curtains, I was looking into a herd of red deer. The males, in crowns of horns, were roaring out their warnings to each other during this mating season.

* * *

One day we hiked through the grounds of the Torridon estate, a Victorian country manor built in 1876 on the north shore of the loch. Behind Torridon House rose the great form of Liathach, or "Gray One," at 3,456 feet the region's tallest peak.

In 1838, John Mackenzie sold the property to Col. MacBarnet, who earned a reputation for being the most hated landlord in the Highlands. When he took over, he immediately demanded that the tenants of three small villages under his care leave their homes and land so the lairds could consolidate their land into large sheep farms. Our walk that day took us past the ruins of numerous stone cottages with empty windows, like sightless eyes staring out to sea.

Duncan Darroch, a Cambridge-educated barrister, bought the estate in 1873 and built Torridon House. Instead of clearing the people out, he got rid of the sheep, returned the farmers to their original land and employed them on his estate.

In 1967, the estate's 14,000 acres, including Stalker's Cottage, were taken over by the National Trust. Appropriately, adjoining the estate is the 11,000-acre Beinn Eighe National Nature Reserve, Britain's first such property established in 1951 to protect and study a 700-acre remnant of an old Caledonian forest with 350-year-old pines. Later that week, we walked through it and felt like gnomes in a magic forest of giant trees, mosses and ferns.