26/09/2026
🥾 30 Days of Walks – Salen Lochan (and a childhood warning! 👀)
Today’s walk started with the very glamorous job of taking the bottles to the recycling banks in Salen! 😂
Oran and I decided that deserved a little reward, so we stopped at Salen Jetty Shop, where I had the most amazing potato and sweetcorn chowder. 😋 Definitely one of the advantages of choosing your walk around lunchtime!
Suitably fuelled, we headed up to the Lochan Walk, one of the forestry walks at Salen or alphabet walk as it is known locally. It’s a lovely little walk around the lochan and doesn't take too long — although there are lots of wee paths heading in different directions, so naturally we explored quite a few of them.
And then, perhaps rather stupidly given my previous promise about not going off-piste during stalking season, we went slightly off-piste. 🙈
There has been quite a bit of tree felling, and I wanted to climb a little higher to see if we could get a view out over Salen Bay.
Also a bit of tree fall, this was where I discovered that Oran is still small enough to wriggle underneath fallen trees and agile enough to leap over them.
Me? Not so much. 🤣🌲🐾
But walking around this lochan also brought back a very vivid childhood memory…
When we were children, we were always told NEVER to go too close to the water, because there were water-horses living in the lochan. If you went to the edge, they would come out of the water, tempt you onto their backs and then carry you down beneath the surface — and you would never get out again! 😳
Needless to say, we were absolutely terrified and kept well away from that lochan. 😂
Looking back now, I wonder how many of these old stories and legends were also a very effective way of keeping children away from dangerous places?
This was, after all, back in the days when you disappeared off to play for hours without your parents accompanying you everywhere. Telling a child “the water is dangerous” might only work so well…
A supernatural horse will drag you to the bottom and keep you there forever apparently worked brilliantly. 🤣🤣
Did your family have another terrifying story designed to stop you going somewhere you shouldn't? 👀
Another walk done ✅ and this one came with soup, tree-clambering and a bit of local folklore. Not bad for a trip to the bottle bank! 🥾🌲🐴