Handa Island Loop Walk

Handa Island is one of the great wildlife spectacles of the Scottish coast — an uninhabited nature reserve off the coast of Sutherland, its towering Torridonian sandstone cliffs home to over 100,000 breeding seabirds each summer, including huge colonies of guillemots, razorbills, and puffins.

The walk starts at Tarbet, a small harbour reached via a narrow road off the A894 between Scourie and Laxford Bridge, with parking and public toilets nearby. From Tarbet, a small passenger ferry — a rowboat-style vessel carrying around a dozen people, running only from April to early September and weather dependent — makes the short crossing to a stunning sandy beach on the island's southern shore. On arrival, a Scottish Wildlife Trust volunteer gives visitors a short introduction and briefing before the walk begins.

From the landing beach, the path heads past another beach and the island's old burial ground to a stone shelter with information on Handa's history — the island supported around 60 people until 1847, when failed potato crops during the Highland Potato Famine forced its abandonment; the remains of the old village are passed a little further on. At a fork amid these ruins, the path for the Great Stack climbs gently across the island's boggy interior on boardwalks, with Arctic and Great Skuas nesting nearby — these large seabirds are notorious for dive-bombing walkers who stray too close to their territory. The path then emerges dramatically at the edge of the 85-metre cliffs of Puffin Bay, running along the clifftop with sensational views of the seabird colonies below and out to the Great Stack, a detached sea stack teeming with nesting birds.

Continuing around the island's western and northern cliffs, the full 6-kilometre loop offers constantly changing views back to the mainland's iconic Sutherland peaks — many of them, like Handa itself, formed from the same ancient Torridonian sandstone — before the path returns to the ferry landing point via the island's southern side.

This is an easy, well-marked walk on boardwalk and clear paths throughout, though the cliff edges near Puffin Bay demand real care and dogs are not permitted anywhere on the island to protect the ground-nesting birds; visitors should allow enough time to complete the full circuit before the last ferry departs in the afternoon.

Parking at Tarbet is free; the ferry is chargeable (cash only) with fares supporting the Scottish Wildlife Trust; there is no public transport to Tarbet.