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Reviews of Applecross Campsite And Flower Tunnel Restaurant
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Applecross Campsite And Flower Tunnel Restaurant
Applecross
Strathcarron
Highlands (Browse area)
IV54 8ND
Tel: 01520 744268
Visit their website Check Digital TV coverage See Weather Forecast
   
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Pitches:
Open: 01/03/2024 to 31/10/2024
01/03/2025 to 31/10/2025
Rating: 
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 Tent Pitches |
 Caravan Pitches |
 Motorhome Pitches |
 Small Campervans |
 No Glamping Units |
 Holiday Homes for Hire |
 Holiday Homes for Sale |
 No Seasonal Pitches |
 Electric Hookups |
 No Hardstandings |
 No Fully Serviced Pitches |
 Show Full Facilities |
| Who's it for |
 Families Welcome |
 Not Members Only |
 Rallies Welcome |
 Not Naturist Site |
 Dogs Welcome |
 No Dogs Allowed |
 Groups Welcome |
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| Facilities |
 Toilet Facilities |
 Hot Showers |
 Washing Up |
 No Bathroom |
 No Baby Changing |
 Laundry On Site |
 Drinking Water |
 Disabled Friendly |
 Chemical Disposal |
 No Battery Charging |
 No Gas Exchange |
 No Recycling Facilities |
 No Kitchen Facilities |
 No Freezer / Fridge |
 No Motorhome Point |
 Wifi Access |
 Shop <1 mile |
 Bar On Site |
 Restaurant or Cafe or Takeaway On Site |
| Activities |
 No Playground |
 No TV Room |
 No Games Room |
 Evening Entertainment |
 Fishing <1 mile |
 No Wild Swimming |
 No Indoor Pool |
 No Outdoor Pool |
 No Horse Riding |
 No Cycle Hire |
 No Golf |
 No Tennis |
 Beach <1 mile |
 Watersports <1 mile |
 No Boat Launch |
| Other Features |
 No Sea Views |
 Not Working Farm |
 No Campfires Allowed |
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 No Waterside Pitches |
 Public Transport <5 miles |
 No Dog Walk |
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Reviews:
97 in total, now showing 71 to 80
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| Date of Visit: September 2009 |
Unit: Campervan |
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| Reviewer: JaneH |
63 reviews from this member |
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 Very disappointing arrival to this site as had booked and paid for 2 nights, £35, to include hook up but on arrival had to find pitch with hook up, nothing is reserved despite the site having your money in advance. The area around the hook ups was a mess, churned up and water logged. We eventually found a flattish, dry spot and managed to get hook up lead to reach however as already mentioned we had the joys of the EHU tripping constantly. Second night we moved on to another EHU and had the electricity that we had paid for.
The reception area is nice but is manned by temporary younger staff and therefore little attention was paid to our concern re the inadequate EHUs.
Not enough toilet and shower facilities for the size of the site. Payphone is in the washing up area do no chance of having a private conversation.
On a positive note the food in the cafe was good (pizza) and the walk down to the Inn. There were 2 resident deer on the village green when we visited. Would recommend getting one of the local walks leaflets from the shop and following the routes aroung the outskirts of the village and over to the walled garden - lovely food in a beautiful setting.
Overall lovely area but campsite is overrated. 
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| Date of Visit: August 2009 |
Unit: Motorhome |
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| Reviewer: Supertractorman |
5 reviews from this member |
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Enjoyed the trip over the Pass of Cattle with wonderful views round each bend.
Unable to get an electric hook up, but spoke to another motorhome owner who said that with only 5 amp of power everything kept on tripping out. I decided against taking one the next night. The area around the electric pitches was a bit muddy due to the wet August.
Showers and Toilet area not big enough for numbers, so grabbed a shower in early afternoon when quiet.
I think this site requires investment in roadways, toilet facilities and organised management as it would appear the TV series is attracting more visitors than the site is designed for.
A lovely area for the keen photographer looking for traditional Scottish views.
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| Date of Visit: July 2009 |
Unit: Tent |
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| Reviewer: GriffReed |
4 reviews from this member |
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This place was just a delight. Somewhere where you could feel you had got away from it all but with so many treasures to experience!
Site fantastic - if you are in a tent avoid the hook-ups or you may end up wedged between caravans and miss out on the space and views that the other 2 fields offer. If you are in the first field be amazed at the amount of kit the motorbike guys can get in their panniers. They must be mini tardises!
Staff very friendly and the reception area and Flower Tunnel a very welcome haven in midst of bad weather or at end of long drive and it is a long drive. From anywhere!
Could do with more showers but that sounds out of their control to some degree. Hopefully landlords will allow further block to be built. That said the queues were never long and no one seemed to mind anyway.The place makes you laid back!
We visited all the eating joints - Applecross Inn, Potting Shed and Flower Tunnel - each great and you could stroll from one to the other topping up level of stuffed-ness! Applecross Inn does a pretty good pint of Guinness which is impressive for something that isn't meant to travel well that it made it in taste-tact across the Bealach-na-Ba! Fab seafood.My husband and children were converts to the prawns and squat lobster!
The Walled Garden has a great tree house and at the other end of Applecross the village hall has a small playpark.Both hugely enjoyed by our 6 & 4 year old.
The mobile grocery (and the wee shop at her B&B and soon to be post office as well) is the best stocked small space that I have ever seen.
Just greata nd the drive and views stunning as well!
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| Date of Visit: June 2009 |
Unit: Tent |
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| Reviewer: Amy777 |
4 reviews from this member |
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Just got back from a wonderful week here. Yes, inspired by the BBC series, as was everyone else we met (even the Dutch, who are over in droves following the airing of the series on Dutch TV)! Unfortunately this means they are having a rather busy year, so this special part of the world is shared with many others at the moment (but I am sure this will die down again next year).
The trip via the Pass of the Cattle was great fun if you're the driver.Not so much fun for the passenger! The hills were shrouded in such thick fog on our arrival day, that we needed front fog lights on just to be able to pick out the narrow road ahead of us.
But the campsite was a welcome relief once we made it over. We headed straight for the 2nd field (the 1st field with EHU was packed, and looked like a cross between a motorhome exhibition and a bikers' cafe!). In the 2nd field we found a wonderful pitch looking out over the sea. Unfortunately, as we found out later in the week, this meant our bedroom pod faced the morning sun and we got cooked alive every morning, but this is not something you should really take for granted in Scotland! The weather was hot after the 1st day and stayed hot all week. (No midges by the way, except a few down at the Inn on one particularly warm night, but we didn't get bitten).
The campsite has a wonderfully laid back, almost hippyish vibe to it (reminding me of Australian youth hostels). You can pitch where you like and the fab reception area has lovely squashy sofas where you can chill out of an evening with a beer from the bar and read some of the eclectic magazine collection or surf the web for free. The reception area leads onto the Flower Tunnel cafe which has yummy, home-cooked food in quirky surroundings. It stays open all day, serving breakfast, lunches, dinners and coffee/cakes (if it rains you could sit in there all day with a coffee and a good book). The locals tend to use it too and will come and have a few drinks in there of an evening, and the lone bikers from the campsite all meet up and share stories of their trips over the Pass of the Cattle, which adds to the atmosphere.
There are only 2 showers for the ladies (and presumably 2 for the men as well), but I never had to queue. There is an ongoing lease battle preventing the 2nd shower block from being completed. Toilets were always clean and well-stocked with loo roll, soap etc.
We had a minor panic about stocking up with cash before coming over to the peninsula, ending up paying £1.75 to withdraw cash from the only machine we found north of Fort William. However we needn't have worried - debit/credit cards were well received in Applecross and there is a cash machine in the campsite reception (which charges a forgiveable £2 given its remoteness!). There is a shop in the village but it is on its last legs as the post office arm of it shut the week we were there. I am sure the strong community will pull together and save it though, as they have the little petrol station. There is also a mobile grocery van which patrols the peninsular most days.
I am not sure how long the campsite will remain being so laid-back re pitching etc, as I got the impression that they had never been as busy as this before (the Monty effect!). Maybe some rules will have to be brought in, as the random pitching didn't always make the best use of space, and we did have some noise problems from other guests on some nights.
I think the problems stemmed from the fact that it doesn't get dark this time of year, so there isn't that psychological 'night time' factor which makes people talk in whispers and tiptoe around! We didn't use any of our lights/torches all holiday - you can walk across the field to the loos at 3am without needing a torch at all.
It was often quite noisy late into the night, which was not normally a problem apart from the 1 time we needed an early night due to a sea kayaking expedition the next day (can HIGHLY recommend this by the way) and it might be a problem if you have kids. We were kept up most nights by a man with a particularly badly behaved pair of dogs who had a nightly routine of losing control of them, shouting for them across the site at 11.45pm. There were regular other incidences of noise and just a general lack of respect for fellow campers late into the night and I do think it is the fact that it stays light all night which contributes to this. There didn't seem to be any wardens around to keep tabs on things in the evenings.
But unless you need to get to bed early for some reason, it shouldn't affect your stay - just go down to the Inn and join in the fun!
The surrounding area is an absolute haven for nature lovers and outdoors enthusiasts. In fact you might even get a bit bored if you're not into these things and plan on staying for more than a couple of nights, but if you are into them you won't want to leave! We saw natterjack toads, seals and rays (from the kayaking trip), birds of prey, deer, sea hares and starfish (in rockpools) and traces of otter (but no sightings) and stunning scenery.
It is worth taking bikes but be prepared for some hard hills, even on the one and only coastal road and you will need to be self sufficient as there are no shops/cafes/sources of water or food outside of Applecross itself on the peninsula.
There are 3 places to eat on the peninsula, all within Applecross - the Flower Tunnel, the Potting Shed/Walled Garden (AMAZING food, Michelin recommended!) and the Applecross Inn (fantastic seafood). They all served up really top quality home made food using fresh local ingredients - we couldn't fault any of them.
There is also a wonderful cafe (and some shops) at Shieldaig which is quite a long drive away (it's on the 'mainland') but well worth it if you want to see the rest of the peninsula via the beautiful northern route.
There isn't much else to see or do (although Monty's bothy is a must - he's left it pretty much as it was in the series), but don't let the lack of mod cons stop you from visiting this wonderful place and getting away from it all.
Oh and we did find that by turning up on a Sunday (after an overnight stop at Loch Lomond YHA en route), there was not a great choice of pitches left. Monday would have been better as a lot of people only seem to stay for 1 night before moving on. If you can arrive on a Friday, that would be perfect, as the place is literally deserted from about midday onwards and you will have a pick of all the pitches - I guess because most people have to stop en route back to England on the Saturday night. There are no check in or check out times on this site.
Don't underestimate the distances involved in getting here; it was a fabulous 4-5 hour drive just from Loch Lomond (which is a good place to overnight en route, as it gets the motorways over and done with and leaves you with the glorious highland roads for day 2). But do make the pilgrimage at least once and see what the UK has to offer at its best (but maybe wait till the Monty fever has died down!).
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| Date of Visit: June 2009 |
Unit: Campervan |
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| Reviewer: Lateagain |
7 reviews from this member |
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Well I 'discovered' applecross 25 years ago having just seen and loved 'Local Hero'. It was just like the village in that film only it actually did have a REAL Inn and a REAL telephone box where the one in the film did not! There were a handful of cars making their way over the pass and they still talked about 'the new road' round the coast as the winter alternative. It was lively then and our tent pitch was near a tap that issued drinking water 'rust brown' with peat staining.
Now in a campervan we had to pay upfront in full when booking and there's just been a TV series featuring Applecross! The pass was busy with loads of 'trippers' as was the pub which I believe was taken over by the current owner a couple of years after our last visit. The whole peninsular seemed to have experienced a lot of development in the last 25 years and the deserted harbour at the end of the Southernmost road had three yachts moored/anchored in it. It's reputation means that it's facilities are now rather stretched. The pub crowded and too busy if you'd not been able to sit outside and the campsite pretty full for outside the school holidays.
The showers and toilets are inadequate (2 of each for gents and the same for ladies) for a camp site with this many pitches.
The other site facilities are fine and the staff helpful so ablutions are the only issue really.
There are numerous walks in the surrounding area from easy to strenuous and the scenery is knock out. A sunset seen here will stick in your memory forever.
The big problem is that the Applecross peninsular is, as it was bound to be, a victim of it's own attractiveness. People will travel miles for a guaranteed knock out location and when too many do so it perhaps looses what made it special to begin with?
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| Date of Visit: May 2009 |
Unit: Tent |
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| Reviewer: Naomi01 |
3 reviews from this member |
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We spent four nights on this site. The drive through the pass was well worth the trip. Lovely little village in a fantastic area, though come prepared with lots of food essentials as the small village shop only stocks basics.
We found the campsite very disappointing. No warm welcome on site and staff show little interest in what's going on there. Pitches were very cramped with no control over where people pitch their tents (we came back on the second day to find that our tent was surrounded by a group of about five smaller tents with their guyropes overlapping ours - yes that close!). We couldn't get our car anywhere near our tent and had to pick our way through their motorbikes and tents. When we complained to the warden about this, nothing was done about it. As we had paid in advance and there are no other sites within miles of this area, we had no choice but to put up with the situation for the following three days.
The pitches were also very waterlogged and the ground was muddy, rutted and well-churned up due to caravans and motorhomes having no hardstanding. Making it a very mucky walk to the toilet block which gets quite busy at times with queueing for toilets and showers, and running out of toilet paper in the early evenings! There also seemed to be a lot of confusion over the hook-ups provided for caravans and motorhomes.
It's a shame because this site has real potential. It's in a beautiful scenic area with great walks and a lovely little village with a super pub (Applecross Inn) which serves fantastic seafood meals.
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| Date of Visit: June 2009 |
Unit: Tent |
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| Reviewer: Thesaint |
29 reviews from this member |
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Its not often that you don't want to leave a campsite as soon as you arrive. This is one of those sites. It has a peaceful, relaxed atmosphere about it. To get here you can come via the narrow winding coastal route which adds about an hour on. Or you can come the direct route over the Bealach Na Ba (Pass of Cattle), which is only suitable for motorcycles or cars only. After surving this route you will appreciate the campsite even more. The online booking system is easy enough if you can't get hold of the office.
The site has all the normal stuff, laundry/dishwashing room, a telephone (no mobile signal, any network), toilets and showers which were all very clean(and cleaned often). The field nearest reception is handy for the toilets but the overflow field has the better views /s unsets over Skye. And also has a path down to the Applecross Inn. We drank in here a couple of times and it was always popular. We didn't eat but the food looked very nice.
Nearby is a Post Office / grocers / filling station which stock most things you might need. Further down the road is Applecross House with its Pottingshed coffee shop / restaurant(which is also very nice). On-site is the Flower Tunnel Cafe which is also the reception / bar area. This is open from 9am to 10pm and serves breakfast / lunches and evening meals(it also does take outs). The food in here is excellent. Also there is free internet access in the reception (that's where we did this review).
We will definitely be coming back again. It cost us £13 per night for two of us plus £1 for our dog.
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| Date of Visit: May 2009 |
Unit: Touring Caravan |
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| Reviewer: Grandma2000 |
9 reviews from this member |
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We like this site but unfortunately this year the weather was rather wet, but that did not spoil our stay. It rained during the day but come early evening the weather would brighten up and the rainbows were vivid, the sunsets were magical.
The post office/grocery store (5 minute walk) stocks most things you may need, they even have petrol pumps there too! The pub is very friendly with good food. We tried the potting shed on this visit, food is good there too, with an area to eat outside if you have children that would rather run and play a little whilst you eat.
There are several walks directly off the site.
The facilities on site are clean and adequate, reception has a pc and a telephone, you would be very luck to receive a telephone signal on site. Reception also have a bar and sell food in the flower tunnel.
We have seen deer on our visits. The views travelling to applecross are amazing. Access can be tricky, if you are towing you must go round the coast route (Wester Trail) as the main route is not suitable due to z bends and passing points. The coastal route is still a scenic route and care still must be taken.
My only complaint on this visit, mainly due to the wet weather and muddy conditions, the hook up side of the field was very crowded at one point, it felt like a car park, another unit was approx 4 ft away from our unit for a couple of nights. Beautiful place to visit.
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| Date of Visit: May 2009 |
Unit: Campervan |
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| Reviewer: Peter Knox |
6 reviews from this member |
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Great site, the pretty Flower Tunnel restaurant served a good breakfast, just a pity they are not open after 5pm.
We could not get an electric hookup the night we stayed, as they were having a problem with the electric supply and distribution. This didn't make any difference to us for one night, but worth checking in advance if this is important to you.
Facilities like dishwashing area, showers, toilets etc. All present, very clean and fresh. The site was quiet when we visited, so there was no need to queue.
Situated above the village on the hillside, a very pleasant spot to unwind and relax after your gruelling drive over the Bealach nam Bo.
I would stay again any time.
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| Date of Visit: May 2009 |
Unit: Tent |
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| Reviewer: The MacKs |
3 reviews from this member |
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Lovely campsite, with friendly staff. They had useful information about the area which they were keen to pass on - leaflets on walks etc.
Would agree that more showers would be needed in high season, but toilet block was very clean. No set pitches was fine at this time of year as it was relatively quiet but it may be more tricky if site was busy.
Great base for walking and enjoying gorgeous beaches in the area. Applecross Inn (about 10 mins walk) has superb food and is very friendly but gets really busy in the evening - you may need to wait a wee while to eat - but worth the wait.
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Is Applecross Campsite And Flower Tunnel Restaurant child friendly? YES, it accepts children View all facilities
Where is the nearest shop to Applecross Campsite And Flower Tunnel Restaurant? There is a shop within 1 mile View all facilities
Is Applecross Campsite And Flower Tunnel Restaurant dog friendly? YES View all facilities
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