A Sense of Place – Local guide to Coigach & Assynt

Explore The Local Guide to Coigach and Assynt App  

Coigach and Assynt’s Local Guide uses your phone’s GPS to automatically trigger rich audio content and deliver turn -by-turn audio content and interesting information relative to your surroundings and upcoming destinations.

  The Local Guide is available to download for free on Apple and Android devices from App Store or here.

“Sense of Place is a phrase used to define how a place makes us feel: what it is about a place that makes it special and different to anywhere else.”

– North West Highlands Geopark –

A Sense of Place Toolkit is available, for use by local businesses and organisations to capture and communicate what makes the Coigach and Assynt Living Landscape area so special. The toolkit, including freely available images and videos, explores the following themes:

• Theme one: A place filled with cultural heritage, creativity & community spirit
• Theme two: Immersive landscapes, ripe for exploration
• Theme three: Beautiful beaches & wild shores
• Theme four: Island mountains

A guidebook of walks in Coigach & Assynt has also been published, highlighting the areas rich natural and cultural heritage. The beautifully illustrated book, Walker’s Guide to Coigach & Assynt, by Dougie Cunningham, is available in local bookshops and by mail order.

Through the development of a North West Highlands Geopark business plan, community consultation, and workshop focused on developing an interpretation strategy for Coigach and Assynt, it was found that interpretation and information on walking routes and landscape is a key part of the visitor experience – and that digitisation into an app would create a central hub and improve access to this data.

The aims of the project were to:

• Produce an app providing interpretation of the landscape from walking and driving routes passing through the project area.
• Highlight the geology that underpins the landscape of the local area and link it to the features of the landscape that people are passing through.
• Offer information on local service providers that can be easily updated and added to at low cost.
• Include several sites where virtual tours can be taken.

Download the Project Report for full details.