Loch Broom opens to the Minch at a width of four miles and runs roughly seven miles southeast, narrowing to a single mile across as it changes direction toward the head. It contains the Summer Isles near its mouth, with Isle Martin closest to the mainland and Loch Kanaird branching off to the northeast. At its head the loch is fed by the River Broom, which rises in the Dirrie Mountains from two source lochs - Loch Bhraoin and Loch Droma - and gathers strength as it descends. The river joins the loch as a fast-flowing torrent with a strong current, having passed Lael Forest and the Cuileig Power Station on the way. Standing at the head looking seaward, the loch reads as a glacial trough doing exactly what glaciers built it to do: carrying water from the high interior down to the open Atlantic.

A peninsula called Scoraig divides Loch Broom from its sister loch to the west, Little Loch Broom - in Gaelic *the little loch*, in geography about a mile across and similarly orientated southeast. The village of Dundonnell sits at its mouth, linked by the A832 coast road to Camusnagaul and Badcaul along the eastern shore. Two rivers feed it. The Allt Airdeasaidh slides into the loch at the Ardessie Falls, and the Dundonnell River descends from the maze of small lochs and burns in the Dundonnell Forest a few miles inland. The defining feature, though, is the ridge that towers over the loch from the southwest: An Teallach, *The Anvil* or *The Forge*. It carries ten summits over three thousand feet - two of them Munros, stretched along a single dramatic skyline - and is, by general agreement, one of the finest mountain ridges in Scotland.

Each end of the loch is held down by its own peak. The entrance to Loch Broom is overlooked by Ben More Coigach, at 2,438 feet, on the Coigach peninsula - the long sandstone ridge with a commanding view of Isle Martin and Loch Kanaird below. The peninsula separating the two lochs carries two Marilyns. Beinn Ghobhlach stands at 2,083 feet at the head of the peninsula, looking down on the entrance to Loch Broom proper and across at Little Loch Broom, with Gruinard Bay and Gruinard Island laid out to the west. Beinn nam Ban, 1,900 feet, sits at the base of the peninsula and looks over Dundonnell. None of these are the great names of Scottish mountaineering, but they are the mountains people who live on these shores grow up watching. They tell the weather before the weather arrives. They turn black before a squall and gold in the late summer evenings.

Loch Broom is an important wildlife habitat. Cormorants haul out on the rocks that jut from the water, drying their wings in the brief breaks between showers. The Summer Isles offshore hold seabird colonies, otters work the shoreline, and grey seals slip between the islets. Ullapool sits halfway up the eastern shore, a planned village laid out at the end of the eighteenth century by the British Fisheries Society, and the working ferry to Stornoway on Lewis still pulls in and out of its harbour at least twice a day. Around the loch the geography never lets you forget what it is for: a deep, sheltered passage from the open Atlantic into the heart of Wester Ross. The herring boats and the curing stations are gone. The ferry and the fishing boats are not. The loch of rain showers still does what it has always done - move water and people between the mountains and the sea.