A Winter Week in Lochinver, Scottish Highlands
Exploring the winter landscapes of Scotland’s northwest Highlands, with an unexpected Pine Marten visitor after dark.
In January 2024 I travelled to Lochinver, in the northwest Highlands of Scotland, for a week of winter landscape photography.
By this point wildlife photography, and particularly photographing owls, had increasingly become the focus of my photography. I’d spent considerably less time shooting landscapes than I had in previous years, so a week in one of the most dramatic parts of Scotland was an opportunity to slow things down, revisit landscape photography and explore somewhere new.
We had rented a beautiful cottage overlooking the loch, surrounded by the mountains and rugged landscape that make this part of Scotland so distinctive. It was a spectacular location in its own right and an ideal base for exploring the surrounding area.
When we arrived, conditions looked incredibly promising. Snow covered the higher ground and many of the lochs were frozen, transforming an already dramatic landscape into exactly the sort of winter conditions I’d hoped for.
Unfortunately, it didn’t last.
Almost as quickly as we’d arrived, the weather changed. Temperatures rose, the snow began to disappear and the frozen lochs started to thaw. It’s one of the realities of landscape photography — you can choose the location and the time of year, but ultimately the conditions are going to do whatever they want.
Fortunately, the northwest Highlands hardly needs snow to provide photographic opportunities.
Over the following days we explored the landscape around Lochinver and further afield, looking for compositions amongst the mountains, lochs, waterfalls and rocky terrain. This is a landscape that can feel enormous and intimate at the same time: great mountains dominating the horizon, but equally interesting details in the water, rocks and vegetation beneath them.
After spending so much of my recent photography concentrating on wildlife, I enjoyed returning to the different pace of landscape photography. Instead of following an animal or waiting for behaviour, it was about exploring, watching how the weather and light changed the landscape and finding compositions amongst it.
As it turned out, however, wildlife was about to find me anyway.
Our cottage had an unexpected nighttime visitor — a Pine Marten.
It began appearing outside after dark and quickly became one of the highlights of the week. Rather than having to search for wildlife amongst the Highlands, I could find myself sitting in the cottage in the evening waiting to see whether our visitor would make another appearance.
On one occasion I ended up lying on the living-room floor with the patio doors slightly open and the camera at ground level. The Pine Marten came remarkably close, allowing me to photograph it at around 50mm as it explored immediately outside.
There was almost no light to work with. Rather than introducing artificial lighting, I photographed using the available ambient light and moonlight, pushing the camera considerably harder than I normally would. Technically the conditions were challenging, but being able to photograph such a normally elusive animal at close quarters made it one of the most memorable encounters of the trip.
There was something particularly special about seeing a Pine Marten this way. During the day we’d been travelling through these huge Highland landscapes looking for photographs, while after dark this secretive little piece of the same environment was appearing almost on our doorstep.
The combination made the week much more than the landscape photography trip I’d originally envisaged.
The winter conditions we’d hoped for might not have lasted, but that didn’t really matter. I came home with new landscape photographs from one of the most beautiful parts of Scotland, renewed enjoyment of a side of photography I’d spent less time pursuing in recent years, and an unexpected wildlife encounter that became one of my strongest memories of the trip.
Sometimes the photographs you plan for aren’t necessarily the ones that make a trip memorable.
Explore more from the Scottish Highlands