“A world away from Islay's open moorland in under a mile — this easy woodland loop threads through ancient coppiced hazel hung with moss and lichen, opens onto two hides over the loch's wetlands, and is gentle enough for the whole family.”
An easy 1-mile trail from the visitor centre to hides overlooking the reserve — home to 30,000+ barnacle geese each winter.
- Easy, family-friendly trail
- Hides overlooking the reserve
- 30,000+ barnacle geese in winter
- Visitor centre with information and facilities
This pocket of hazel, sycamore and beech woodland sits within the wider RSPB Loch Gruinart reserve, and its oldest parts — a stand of coppiced hazel thick with moss and lichen — belong to a habitat type conservationists call Scotland's Rainforest: Atlantic hazelwood, rare worldwide and shaped by Scotland's mild, wet, oceanic climate. Some of Scotland's other Atlantic hazelwoods have been traced back roughly 11,000 years, to soon after the last ice retreated, and support lichens and fungi found nowhere else on Earth — this particular stand hasn't been dated that precisely, but it's the same rare habitat.
The Woodland Trail itself is a comparatively recent addition, laid out as an easy one-mile loop from the RSPB's visitor centre at Aoradh Farm. It drops down to a viewing platform over the tidal loch, threads through the old hazel coppice and taller sycamore and beech, and passes two purpose-built hides — Taigh Deas and Taigh Tuath — looking out over freshwater wetland and saltmarsh respectively. In spring the woodland floor turns blue with bluebells underfoot.
Corncrakes call from the fields around the wood in spring and summer, while the hides look out over wintering wildfowl and geese, with otters sometimes seen from the freshwater hide in spring. White-tailed eagles hunt over the reserve in winter, and the hazel coppice itself is worth a slow look: its mossy, lichen-covered stems are part of one of Scotland's rarer woodland habitats.