Qualla: Rannoch Moor

Rannoch Moor: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit james denham, CC BY-SA 2.0. Twenty-five thousand years ago, the glaciers ground their way across Britain and Ireland, gouging the long U-shaped valleys that filled with the ribbon-lochs of the western Highlands. Most of the ice was gone fourteen thousand years ago. But Rannoch Moor was one of the places where it lingered. A vast block of ice persisted here for another three thousand years, and the land beneath it was tundra long after the rest of Scotland had begun to forest. The crust of the earth is still rebounding from that weight, rising at three millimetres a year. The result is fifty square miles of boggy plateau, treeless, road-less in the centre, where the wind never quite stops and the midges arrive in clouds the moment the sun comes out. There are easier places to visit. There are very few stranger ones.

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Image: james denham | CC BY-SA 2.0

Rannoch Moor: The Floating Railway

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Mitchell, CC BY-SA 2.0. Rannoch Moor has two railway stations, which seems impossible the moment you stand on the platform and look around. The West Highland Line crosses the moor between Bridge of Orchy and Corrour, opening up country that has no public roads of any kind. The engineers who built it in ...

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Image: Alan Mitchell | CC BY-SA 2.0

Rannoch Moor: The Road That Wasn't

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) Nicolesabrina at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. The song says: Sure by Tummel and Loch Rannoch and Lochaber I will go, by heather tracks wi' heaven in their wiles. It is called The Road to the Isles, composed by Pipe Major John McLellan in 1917, and Scots have been gleefully spoofing it for a century. The truth is that this wa...

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Image: User: (WT-shared) Nicolesabrina at wts wikivoyage | Public domain

Rannoch Moor: Corrour and the Tetrapak Estate

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah McGuire, CC BY-SA 2.0. The northern half of Rannoch Moor belongs to Corrour Estate, which is owned by Lisbet Rausing, an heir to the Tetra Pak fortune. The southern tract is managed by Scottish Natural Heritage. Both owners are now trying to undo the damage of two centuries of commercial forestry and d...

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Image: Sarah McGuire | CC BY-SA 2.0

Rannoch Moor: Midges, Munros, and Trainspotting

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jousset, CC BY-SA 4.0. All the Highlands have midges in summer, but in the west you meet Culicoides impunctatus, the Great West Highland Mudge. Too small to swat, too numerous to flee, indifferent to most insect repellents. They do not like cold or wind, which is sometimes a comfort. The moor has Munro...

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Image: Jousset | CC BY-SA 4.0