Welcome to the Ullapool News

Ullapool Book Festival is delighted to now announce that Bernard MacLaverty is the author who will be appearing at our very final event on Saturday 10 October. He will be chaired by our honorary president Chris Dolan.  Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast and lived there until 1975 when he moved to Scotland with his wife, Madeline, and four children. He has published six collections of short stories and five novels. His latest book was Blank Pages & Other Stories. He has written versions of his fiction for other media – radio plays, television plays, screenplays (for Cal, for Lamb, and Midwinter Break and short film Bye-Child) and libretti for Scottish Opera. He is a member of Aosdana in Ireland.

The event will be held in Ullapool ferry terminal (upstairs) at 2.30pm. Tickets (£10), will go on sale (online only) on Saturday 29 August at 10am. Details of how to get them will be announced in a couple of weeks.  This final event is being held in memory of our fellow committee member Catriona Martin who sadly died last November. We sorely miss her warmth, wit and wisdom.  When buying tickets there will be an opportunity for you, if you wish, to make a donation to the Renal Unit at Raigmore Hospital, Inverness where Catriona went for dialysis three times a week for five years. She couldn’t praise the staff and her treatment there highly enough.

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Welcome Ullapool is delighted to announce that the new Ullapool Hill Path signs are now in place at each entrance: Broom Park, Rhidorroch Road, Royal Hotel and Braes.

The 4 different and connected paths are marked in Red, Yellow, Green and Blue and a key describes the routes and likely timings.  We wished to avoid single use paper maps and hope that visitors can photograph the sign and follow the newly coloured way markers on their chosen route.

We would like to thank our funders: LBCC EDF Fund; North Highland Initiative CISP Fund, and The Highland Council Ward Discretionary Fund. Thanks are also due to Chris Dyer who undertook putting the new posts in place on behalf of the Skiff Group for a donation to their funds, and Mike Bryant for putting the signs in place. Our Committee members have spent many, many hours on this project and have walked the routes too many times to count, and we hope that everyone will find this useful for many years to come.

The QR Code on the signs will direct visitors to the same map on www.ullapool.com

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Another successful Ullapool Coastal Rowing Club regatta (17th)was held over the weekend of 10-12 July, with 16 other clubs travelling to the event.  Dry, and blustery, the NE wind caused some problems on the return leg of the course but thanks for all the support which makes this event such a success

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Ullapool Bookshop’s next highly anticipated Author event will take place on Thursday 30th July at 5.30pm.  Highland Crime writer G. H. Halliday (Author of ‘From the Shadows’, upon which the new ITV series ‘The Dark’ is based), will be in conversation with Bookshop Manager Katharine for the Ullapool launch of his novel ‘From the Shadows.’

Set in the Highlands and in particular in Wester Ross, Gareth will be lifting the lid on his Crime novels, which although were released a few years ago, have now been republished and made into a brand new ITV series (The Dark) which began on ITV on Sunday 12th July.

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