Glen Affric
— — the old pinewood, still keeping its own counsel.
Not only on a wall.
“A long glen running west from Cannich, past Loch Beinn a' Mheadhoin and Loch Affric, into one of the last surviving fragments of the Caledonian pine forest. The single-track road ends and the path keeps going. Walkers report the same thing: the wind drops where the pines start, and the water turns the colour of weak tea against the granite. from the studio
Glen Affric, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Glen Affric runs roughly thirty kilometres west from the village of Cannich in the Highland council area of Scotland, threading past Loch Beinn a' Mheadhoin and Loch Affric before the road gives out at the head of the glen. It sits inside the Glen Affric National Nature Reserve, managed by Forestry and Land Scotland and NatureScot, and shelters one of the largest surviving remnants of the ancient Caledonian pinewood that once covered much of the Highlands. The nearest town of any size is Inverness, about forty kilometres to the east.
Beyond the car park at Loch Affric there is no tarmac and no mobile signal. The path along the south side of the loch is part of the Affric Kintail Way, a seventy-kilometre route that runs west to Morvich on the Atlantic coast. Walkers who carry on past Athnamulloch reach Glen Affric Youth Hostel, one of the most remote hostels in Britain, with no road access at all. It is the held-in quality of the place that visitors describe most often, more than the view itself.
The Scots pines turn from grey-green to a warmer copper-bronze in late October as the birches around the lochs go to gold, and the pinewood reads at its richest from then until the first snows close the upper path. In summer the midges can be heavy on still evenings near the water. The road in from Cannich is single-track with passing places and is occasionally closed by snow above the upper car park between December and February.