Laide  is a beautiful village with little more than a shop/garage to its name. The village is however in a stunning location in the Gruinard Bay, and in winter, the backdrop of snow capped mountains. The charm of the Scottish mountains are that some are fairly easy to climb from bottom to top, but others offer as hard a mountaineers challenge as almost any in Europe. This is particularly true in icy wintertime, where the days are short, and the nights can be cold indeed.

There is a beautiful local beach, mainly sand, but with some well rounded hand sized frost coated pebbles washed up into storm banks – the long early morning shadows cast magical shapes and patterns through the pebbles and ridged sand. As a backdrop lies the ruined chapel of Laide, the chapel dates from the thirteenth century right on the beach edge, surrounded by a more recent graveyard.

Out in the bay lies tiny Gruinard Island, which the locals know as “Anthrax Island!” During World War Two, the British military tested the potency of Anthrax on that Island.

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