Walking with Plato (8 page)

If one keeps on walking, everything will be alright.

—Kierkegaard,
Letter to Henrietta

Chapter Three

Open Spaces

Fort William – Kinlochleven – King’s House Hotel – Tyndrum – Inverarnan – Rowardennan – Drymen – Milngavie

The road between John o’Groats and Inverness is almost unremittingly dull. The Great Glen Way, like the curate’s egg, is good in parts. But the West Highland Way is sublime.

It runs ninety-six miles from Fort William to Milngavie, near Glasgow, through some of the wildest, remotest, and loveliest parts of the Scottish Highlands. It meanders through pastoral landscapes, passes between rugged peaks, stretches across desolate moors, cuts through leafy forests, and runs beside serene lochs.

It attracts seventy-five thousand visitors a year, of which thirty thousand walk the entire trail. But you’d never know it. You pass other walkers now and then, but in the main you have the mountains, the moors, the forests, and the lochs to yourself.

Our first day’s walk on the West Highland Way took us thirteen miles from
Fort William
to
Kinlochleven
, a none-too-pretty village, prettily situated on the eastern side of Loch Leven, and surrounded on three sides by mountains.

An hour or so into the morning, on a long ascent through a forest at the edge of Glen Nevis, we saw two young men limping towards us. I mean,
really
limping – worse, even, than Wendy when she had limped into Dunbeath.

They hobbled up alongside us, tight-lipped and wincing with pain, and asked, ‘How much further?’

It turned out that they had walked almost the entire length of the West Highland Way, going from south to north, in just four days, and were about to complete the last few miles after wild-camping nearby on the previous night.

They were young and strong, and had been confident that they could cope with the punishing schedule they had set for themselves. But they had reckoned without the blisters.

They
all
reckon without the blisters.

Just three weeks previously, Wendy and I had reckoned without the blisters. But now, with 120 miles of road and 70 miles of walking trail behind us, we knew better.

We assured them that they hadn’t far to go, and that their trials would soon be over. But, in truth, I felt sure that their trashed feet would continue to hurt them for a long time yet.

After wishing them well, we resumed our journey: out of the forest, along an old military road through an empty glen, and then down a wooded hillside to our campsite in Kinlochleven.

It was on this day that I began to think of myself, for the first time, as a walker.

I had now hiked almost two hundred miles, carrying a heavy rucksack up and down hills, through sun and rain, along highways and byways, through towns and villages, and through forests and moors and glens. And I still had a thousand miles to go.

I had endured fatigue, blisters, aches and pains, sunburn, and boredom. Yet I was still going. And I was going stronger than ever.

In the early days of JoGLE, I had always found the last few miles of each day to be a dull, painful slog. But now I found them merely dull. The pain wasn’t there any more. Or, if it was, I had become inured to it.

Also, in the early days, I had found my rucksack to be a cumbersome, wearisome, and thoroughly loathsome object. It had seemed terribly heavy back then. Whenever I stopped for a break, I would put it down with a feeling of exquisite relief. And when the break was over I would have to steel myself to the task of taking it up again.

But now my rucksack felt like part of me. And, although it still felt heavy at times, at other times I would walk for miles barely conscious of it.

As a long-distance walker, I had gone from zero to hero, from bumbling novice to seasoned pro, in just a few short weeks.

On the following day, Wendy and I had planned to walk twenty-one miles from Kinlochleven to the tiny village of Bridge of Orchy. But, with heavy rain forecast, we decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and opted instead to walk just nine miles to a popular wild-camping site beside the
King’s House Hotel
.

This short section of the West Highland Way is a straightforward up-and-down affair: up the Devil’s Staircase, a zigzag track ascending the rocky ridge of Aonach Eagach, and then back down again.

Wendy, inspired by the dramatic views of the Glencoe Mountains and stimulated by the physical challenge of the Devil’s Staircase, was in tremendous form, and spent the day striding forward with great gusto. I, on the other hand, felt unaccountably lacklustre, and spent the day lagging behind.

Even heroes and seasoned pros, it seems, have their off days.

That afternoon, just before the rain began, we pitched our tent, as best we could, amidst a scattering of other tents and a few billion midges on the scrubby moorland at the back of the King’s House Hotel. Then we headed into the hotel’s Climbers’ Bar and stayed there, out of reach of the rain and the midges, until closing time.

The King’s House Hotel is reputed to be one of Scotland’s oldest licensed inns, and is certainly one of its most remote. It was built in the seventeenth century to cater for travellers crossing nearby Rannoch Moor, and now caters for fisherman, hikers, climbers, and skiers.

Those with sufficient funds can retire to one of the hotel’s bedrooms, after closing time, and can look out of their picture windows upon the mountains, the moors, the wind, the rain, and the deer. But Wendy and I, being without sufficient funds, had to retire to our backpacker tent and keep more intimate company with the mountains, the moors, the wind, the rain, and the midges.

Midges are mosquito-like biting insects that infest large parts of the Highlands and Western Scotland during the summer months. They’re so tiny that they’re barely visible to the human eye, but there are
lots
of them. A square metre of ground can hold
half a million
. So it’s little consolation to know that only the females bite.

Each summer, midges ruin countless picnics, walks, and camping trips. They make thousands of visitors vow never to set foot in the Scottish countryside again, and are estimated to cost the tourist industry £300 million a year.

Despite taking every precaution to prevent midges from entering our inner tent in the night, Wendy and I woke up the next morning covered in itchy lumps. Then, when we ventured outside, we were descended upon by hordes of the little bastards.

One midge bite is no big deal. It feels like a tiny, hot pinprick. But a full-scale attack, consisting of perhaps a dozen hot pinpricks per second, drives you to distraction. So we dived back into the tent and covered every square inch of skin with long-trousers, long-sleeved shirts, gloves, and mesh hoods. Only then could we take down our camp, ready to set off on the day’s hike: nineteen miles from the King’s House Hotel to
Tyndrum
, including a lengthy stretch across Rannoch Moor.

Rannoch Moor is a vast wilderness of peat bogs, streams, lochs, and lochans, a fifty-square-mile elevated plateau encircled by mountains.

In Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Kidnapped
, the narrator, David Balfour, says of Rannoch Moor, ‘A wearier-looking desert never man saw’. But he was fleeing for his life and dangerously ill at the time. So doubtlessly that coloured his perceptions.

My experience of it was very different. I found it to be a wild and lovely place. Something about it – something to do with its vastness and openness, and its harsh, untamed beauty – seemed to set my soul free.

Generally, in my everyday life, my thoughts writhe and churn inside my head like the proverbial can of worms. But there, on the moor, they seemed to find release. I felt smaller than I usually do, and less important than I usually do, and it was a good feeling.