Qualla: Loch Shin

Loch Shin: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lynn M Reid, CC BY-SA 2.0. Loch Shin runs in an almost perfect straight line for seventeen miles, northwest to southeast, with the bulk of Ben More Assynt on one side and Ben Klibreck on the other. It is the longest loch in Sutherland. If you stood on its eastern shore today and could somehow look back in time eighty years, the water would be lower than your feet by more than thirty feet. The Highlands paid for their electricity by raising this loch and others like it.

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Image: Lynn M Reid | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loch Shin: Raised by Thirty Feet

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graeme Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the 1950s, Wimpey Construction built the Lairg Dam at the southeast end of the loch. The wall is not large by international standards, but the result on a long, narrow Highland basin was dramatic. The water level rose by more than thirty feet, drowning shoreline farms, old pat...

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Image: Graeme Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loch Shin: Mountains North and South

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Webb, CC BY-SA 2.0. On either side of the loch the land rises into some of the most distinctive mountains of the northwest. To the west is Ben More Assynt, the highest peak in Sutherland at 3,273 feet, sharing a ridge with its twin Conival. The geology beneath their grey screes is Cambrian and Pre-C...

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Image: Richard Webb | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loch Shin: The Outflow and the Sea

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donald Bain, CC BY-SA 2.0. The loch drains through the short, steep River Shin, which falls almost immediately into the gorge above the Falls of Shin. From there the water joins the Kyle of Sutherland at Inveran and flows out into the Dornoch Firth and the North Sea. The whole journey from the head of Loch...

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Image: Donald Bain | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loch Shin: Sheep Country and a Monument

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donald Bain, CC BY-SA 2.0. The land around the loch is among the most thinly inhabited in Scotland. Sheep farming is the main agricultural activity, the heirs of the great changes that reshaped Sutherland in the nineteenth century when townships across the strath were cleared and the population moved or sc...

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Image: Donald Bain | CC BY-SA 2.0