TODAY'S navigators have it easy compared to those of long, and not so long, ago.

FOLLOWING our recent article on the "secrets of Loch Shin" many older residents who remember the days before the hydro dam was built have come forward with their memories of the paradise lost beneath the waves at the southern end of the 18-mile loch.

DUE TO dry weather and 24-hour running of machines in connection with hydro electric generation, Loch Shin has been exceptionally low this autumn, and day by day some of the old secrets of past mid 20th century life and work are slowly being revealed.

IN 1848, the three Olsen brothers, Fredrik, Petter and Andreas, each one a sea captain, founded the shipping company that carries their name to this day.

SUTHERLAND – there is no way of knowing his real name – was sold as a slave on 18th July 1803 in Demerara, now part of Guyana on the north coast of South America.

SECRETS which have lain undiscovered for centuries are beginning to reveal themselves on Brora’s Back Beach during a two-week archaeological excavation which officially began on Monday.

THE annual summer school of the Council for Scottish Archaeology was held in north Sutherland last weekend with 68 delegates from all over the country engaged in an ambitious series of daytime field trips and evening lectures.

A SURVEY of spinning-wheels still kept by people in East Sutherland – undertaken recently to help with information for a database at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh – has produced some interesting results.

ONE OF the first duties of the new Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the Rev Sheilagh Kesting, will be a visit to Brora next month to help mark the centenary of Clyne Parish Church.

A COMMUNITY project to identify the visible and accessible archaeological features of Ceannabeinne township, near Durness, and provide information about the biggest well preserved pre-clearance farm town in Sutherland has got under way.

EXACTLY 100 years ago Sutherland received a rather surprising visitor when, in April 1907, a young woman from Manchester stepped off the train at Brora.

ON a Sunday, a fine summer’s evening in 1934, he arrived from the West to spend the night in Melvich, “a little village on the Pentland Firth” as he later described it, albeit a wee bit inaccurately.

THIS interesting photograph has been sent to me by a relative who lives in the Gosport area on the south coast of England.

AN AUDIENCE of 60 members of Clyne Heritage Society and invited guests attended the opening night of the society's annual summer exhibition in Brora Library last Friday.