Qualla: Loch Coruisk

Loch Coruisk: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Allan, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walter Scott reached Loch Coruisk in 1814 and wrote: 'Rarely human eye has known / A scene so stern as that dread lake, / With its dark ledge of barren stone.' Fifty years later Tennyson tried to repeat the trip and complained: 'After a fatiguing expedition over the roughest ground on a wet day we arrived at the banks of the loch, and made acquaintance with the extremest tiptoes of the hills, all else being thick wool-white fog.' The Cauldron of Waters lies at the foot of the Black Cuillin and shows itself only when the mountains decide. Tennyson was unlucky. Most visitors are.

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Image: John Allan | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loch Coruisk: The Cauldron

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Remi Mathis, CC BY-SA 3.0. Coir' Uisge means cauldron of waters - a fitting Gaelic name for a loch nearly two miles long but only about four hundred yards wide, lying in a glacier-scooped trough at the foot of some of the most concentrated mountain wilderness in Britain. The northern end is ringed by the B...

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Image: Remi Mathis | CC BY-SA 3.0

Loch Coruisk: The Bad Step

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gordon Hatton, CC BY-SA 2.0. There is no road to Loch Coruisk. To get there you either take a boat from the village of Elgol, half an hour across Loch Scavaig with seals usually basking on the skerries, or you walk - from Sligachan, the long way through Glen Sligachan, or from Elgol along the coastal path. T...

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Image: Gordon Hatton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loch Coruisk: Painters and Writers

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Allan, CC BY-SA 2.0. Scott's verse in The Lord of the Isles (1815) drew the first wave of Romantic tourists. By the mid-19th century the loch had become a fashionable destination for landscape painters travelling north - William Daniell, J. M. W. Turner, Sidney Richard Percy, Alexander Francis Lydon,...

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Image: John Allan | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loch Coruisk: What You See When You Get There

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin Thackeray, CC BY-SA 2.0. On a clear evening Coruisk does something to scale that defies photographs. The Cuillin behind it, particularly Sgurr Alasdair and Sgurr nan Gillean, rise nearly vertically from the loch's far shore, and the water below holds them inverted in the kind of mirror that requires no w...

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Image: Martin Thackeray | CC BY-SA 2.0