The name itself is a number. *Cóigeach* comes from the Gaelic for *fifth* or *fifths* - a reference to the five original townships: Achduart, Achnacarinan, Acheninver, Achnahaird and Achiltibuie. The peninsula thrusts west from Wester Ross into the Minch, looking out across the Summer Isles and back toward the mainland mountains. From sea level the land rises sharply. Ben Mor Coigach stands at 743 metres above the loch and the bay, its long Torridonian sandstone ridge weathered into a striking horizontal silhouette. The other defining peak is Stac Pollaidh, smaller in altitude but distinctive in profile - a battered crown of jagged pinnacles that anyone who has driven the lane to Achiltibuie carries away as the postcard of the area. Between mountain and shore sits the moorland, studded with lochans, cut by streams, fringed by a deeply indented rocky coast of bays, headlands and islands.

The 1852-1853 stand against eviction is not a polite local story. It is one of the rare Highland Clearances actions that worked. The factor's officers came with summonses, and the women of Coigach met them at the road. Twenty policemen and sheriff officers were disarmed, their summonses burned in front of them, their batons hurled into the sea. The men stood as the second line, prepared to defend the women if matters turned violent, but the officers chose to leave rather than escalate. Four weeks later a smaller party of six constables tried again and was sent home the same way. Two years passed in a slow stalemate. Eventually the estate's managers and the laird stopped pressing the matter. No eviction notice was ever served, no family removed. Across most of the Highlands the same decade saw township after township emptied, families bundled onto ships for Canada and Australia. Coigach did not. The reasons are local and specific - the geography, the kin networks, the particular obstinacy of these particular families - but the result was a community that remained itself.

The peninsula has held on to its Gaelic literary life as fiercely as it held on to its land. Murchadh MacGilleathain - Murdo MacLean - was a native of Coigach who emigrated to the American West before the First World War, like many Gaels of his generation. Around 1910 he wrote a song-poem on his cattle ranch in Montana, *S ann a fhuair mi m' àrach an taobh tuath de Alba mhòr*: 'It was in the north of great Scotland that I was reared.' The song carried the cowboy's loneliness for a Highland coast he could see in his mind from a thousand miles of grass. As he had hoped to in the song, he eventually came home to Coigach. His verses entered the local oral tradition and were later collected and recorded by the School of Scottish Studies from Maighread Cros at Ceann Loch Iù, on the shore of Loch Ewe. The geography is exact. A song made on a Montana ranch came back to be sung in a parish on the next loch north.

Today Coigach forms a community within the Highland council area, still part of historic Ross and Cromarty for land registration and lieutenancy purposes. In 2010 the residents established the Coigach Community Development Company to tackle the slow attritions that the police could not - housing affordability, an ageing population, the fragility of small-village services. A subsidiary, Coigach Wind Power, runs a 500-kilowatt wind turbine whose revenue funds the development company's projects. The Coigach and Assynt Living Landscape Project, led by the Scottish Wildlife Trust with private and community landowners, is trying to bring back the woodland connectivity and species richness that grazing pressure stripped out over centuries. The peninsula that defied the clearances now meets its next set of challenges the same way - one community organisation, one wind turbine, one carefully argued meeting at a time.