There is an old Celtic phrase, “Àiteachan Caola” that speaks of “thin places”—where the veil between the everyday and the eternal feels worn, where you can sense that you are close to something larger than yourself. People often think first of Iona or the Callanish Stones on the Isle of Lewis which inspired Dougie MacLean’s song: Feel So Near.
“The old man looks out to the island
he says this place is endless thin…
there’s no real distance here to mention,
no distance to the spirits of the living,
no distance to the spirits of the dead.”
— Dougie MacLean, Feel So Near
Àiteachan Caola – Thin Places
In Scottish Gaelic, àiteachan caola means “thin places.” The word caol (pronounced “kull”) describes something narrow or slender – the same root found in Highland place-names such as Caolas Cummhann at Kylesku, meaning “the narrow strait.”
In older Gaelic and Celtic belief there were places where the boundary between the everyday world and the world of spirit felt especially slender – where time paused, the heart opened, and the distance between heaven and earth seemed small. Badcall Bay and much of the North-West Highlands still carry that quiet, unmistakable sense of àiteachan caola – thin places in every sense.
A landscape that holds you still
The North-West Highlands are a land of extremes: billion-year-old rock, restless seas, and mountains that rise like watchtowers from moor and lochan. Yet within this grandeur, there is a gentleness—moments of silence, of light on water, of wind carrying a memory that feels both ancient and intimate. It is why people who visited the area once, decades ago, still write instructions that they wish their final farewell to be tied to these shores or mountains.
The solace of Badcall Bay
For me, this truth is not abstract. My paternal grandfather was one of the first men called up in 1914. He had served as a soldier in the Scottish Horse Territorials (Blair Atholl) which meant early mobilisation. He went on to survive Gallipoli, then the Imperial Camel Corps campaigns in Egypt and Palestine but was among the last in the British Army to be demobbed. He carried home the invisible injuries we would now call PTSD. In time, he found healing not in words, but on the west coast, specifically in the North West Highlands around Eddrachillis Bay and Badcall Bay .
These places became his sanctuary: the rhythm of the tide, the moonlight on the waters, the shifting light across moors, waterfalls, mountains and islands. Badcall Bay is not a grand viewpoint marked on any map, but a place where the world slows and something inside steadies. Liminal, a threshold, a thin place, if ever there was one.
Where the veil feels light
There are many such places here including:
Suilven, Assynt – rising solitary from loch and moor, its profile reminding us how small and yet how enduring a human life is.
Quinag – layered with the stories of the earth itself, walking here feels like walking inside deep time.
Ardvreck Castle and Loch Assynt - associated with tales of devilish pacts, mermaids and ghosts, it’s worth stepping away from the main tourist track to the ruins, soak in the scenery and feel something mysterious surround you.
Sandwood Bay – four miles on foot to a vast sweep of sand, sea and silence, where you arrive talking and leave whispering.
The Old Man of Stoer – a sentinel sea stack, watching over Atlantic horizons where sea and sky dissolve together.
Loch Dhu and Glencoul– framed by ancient rocks in visible strata, the tallest continuous waterfall in the UK, and waters that hold many secrets of wrecks and brave endeavours. Even the modern curve of steel and grace in the Kylesku Bridge over ancient waters, signals the special nature of this place and turns a journey into a moment of awe.
Smoo Cave and the Bone Caves – places with echoes from the past, informed by more recent archaeology, reminding us that people have been living here, carrying love and loss into these hills. since long before memory.
Handa Island – summer alive with seabirds, cliffs that give both perspective and wonder. Derelict homes that tell of potato famine and desperate requested “clearance” to Canada
Badcall Bay – close at hand, yet eternal in feeling: a small inlet that becomes immense once you let it speak to you.
Ben Hope & Dun Dornaigil
Below Scotland’s most northerly Munro, an Iron-Age broch keeps watch beside a river while a high waterfall threads down the hill. It is a place of movement and memory—stone and water carrying different kinds of time—where silence feels full rather than empty. Many call such spots àiteachan caola — thin places — because something in us seems to breathe more easily here.
Why people return, even at the end
Again and again, guests write to us years after their last visit: not just to remember, but to request. They want their final chapter here—ashes scattered by a favourite mountain, on the waters of the bay or a last walk remembered in a family story. Not because the Highlands promise grandeur alone, but because they give something rarer: a sense of belonging, of being gently gathered back into the great fabric of things.
A gentle note on visiting
If you come looking for such places, come unhurried. Walk lightly, respect the land and its people, and allow the stillness to work on you. Thin places do not shout; they wait. Often, you’ll find them not at the summit, but on the path home, when the light softens and you realise the day has already changed you.
In the end, that is why the North-West Highlands remain in people’s hearts.
Not for what they demand, but for what they give: a pause, a presence, a reminder that the distance between heaven and earth may not be so very wide after all.
