There are few places in my life that I’ve found more ruggedly beautiful than the Northern Highlands of Scotland. I’m proud to call it home.

The place is magical – it’s so far north, so remote, that sometimes it feels like you’ve left this world and gone to another.

The word bleak is…..well, it’s a bleak word. The word beautiful however is…..well, it’s a beautiful word.

So, how is it possible that these two words, that mean the complete antithesis of one another be used to describe the same scene?

Well, this location was and can quite often be, bleak and beautiful at the same time. Because to my eyes there is real beauty in bleak landscapes.

Loch Stack is not far from where we live and on a bitterly cold mid winter’s afternoon, there was fresh snow on the ground still falling from a blue sky and a chilling wind cutting through the mountains. The empty bothy cut a forlorn figure.

However, with raptors circling above, stags foraging in the glens the snow capped peaks of Assynt taking guard of the view, this bleak scene, also became a beautiful one.

It became a special moment, a privileged experience, a time when moodiness and broodiness would lie in its preternatural beauty. That is true, too, of many other landscapes of bleakness, though nowhere is quite as magical as the Highlands of Scotland.