BEAULY SYSTEM FISH AND FISHERY ACTION PLAN ... - RAFTS

2. Catchment and Fishery Description.2.1 Physical Characteristics of Catchment.The River Beauly drains a catchment of approximately 1000 square kilometres ofland thus making it the second largest catchment north of the Great Glen. Thecatchment extends almost to the west coast with the most westerly tributariesbeing only approximately 7km east of Loch Duich. The mean altitude of thecatchment is in excess of 385m and several peaks are in excess of 1000m.The Mullardoch and Affric regions of the upper catchment comprise largely ofmetamorphosed sedimentary rocks belonging to the Moine succession. AroundLoch Monar there are outcrops of older metamorphic rocks. Strathglass isdominated by quartz-feldspar-granulite. The Farrar catchment contains quartzfeldspar-granulite,schists and gneiss. The lower catchment is dominated by OldRed Sandstone.Maps illustrated below show the bedrock and superficial geologyof the Beauly catchment.The closest Met Office weather station to the region for which data is available isKinloss, although this is outside the Beauly catchment area. The 1971-2000average temperature at the weather station is 12.2 °C with annual averages of 53.5days of frost, 1261.4 hours of sunshine, 624.4mm rainfall and 127.6 days ofrainfall greater than 1mm. However, the Beauly catchment covers a large areaincluding sections in close proximity to the west coast. As such there is likely tobe a large geographic range in the temperature and rainfall patterns within thecatchment. This is reflected in the average rainfall values at the SEPA gaugingstations found in Table 1.Key to Superficial Geology:ALV = AlluviumBSA = Blown SandGSG = Glacial Sand and GravelPeat = PeatRMD = Raised Marine DepositsSlip = LandslipTill = TillUNKD = Unknown7