by Gary Hayden
Our destination was Gairlochy, which consists of little more than two pretty locks, which connect a section of the Caledonian Canal to the southern end of Loch Lochy.
We arrived there quite early in the afternoon. However, the nearest campsite was a mile or two off the trail, which meant that we had to finish an otherwise pleasant day with some tedious and unproductive road-walking.
We had passed no shops that day. Nor on the previous day. So we decided to use our emergency packets of dehydrated potatoes and meatballs for dinner. We’d bought them prior to setting off on JoGLE, and had been carrying them for the best part of two hundred miles.
They were horrible.
The following morning, we feasted – in the loosest sense of the word – on cereal bars before retracing our steps to Gairlochy, ready for our final assault on the Great Glen Way.
We had just twelve miles to cover. And because they were flat, easy miles, and because the sun was shining, and because, after two consecutive days of short walks, our feet were feeling a whole lot better, we felt good.
First, we walked along a pretty section of towpath that runs between the canal and the River Lochy, arriving around lunchtime at Neptune’s Staircase, a magnificent series of eight individual locks, which joins the Caledonian Canal with the sea loch, Loch Linnhe, sixty-four feet below.
From there, our route ran alongside Loch Linnhe, with fine views of Ben Nevis, Britain’s highest mountain, then through a housing estate in the village of Corpach, and finally into Fort William, the largest town in the West Highlands.
Our destination was the Glen Nevis Caravan and Camping Park, an enormous campsite catering for the vast numbers of campers, caravanners, hikers, climbers, mountain-bikers, cyclists, and other assorted nature enthusiasts that converge upon Fort William each year.
To get there, we had to walk through the town centre, past the obelisk that marks the southern end of the Great Glen Way, and then past the signpost that marks the northern end of the West Highland Way. So, in a single day, we got to finish one national walking trail and begin another.
The campsite was beautifully situated in a deep valley at the foot of the mighty Ben Nevis. The afternoon was young. We had the entire evening ahead of us, and an entire day off to look forward to. Life was good.
One thing I learned very quickly on JoGLE is the inestimable value of a day off.
A day off provides you with necessary rest for your tender feet and tired body. It relieves you of the morning chore of taking down your tent and the evening chore of setting it up again. It gives you time to wash and dry your clothes, to stock up on groceries, to plan the next stage of your journey, and even to lounge around reading a novel or listening to music.
It’s an oasis of ease and comfort.
To the non-walker, it may sound strange to hear a day spent camping in a backpacker tent, catching up on laundry, and shopping for groceries described as an oasis of ease and comfort.
But comfort is a relative concept.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, wrote: ‘What the English call “comfort” is something inexhaustible and illimitable. Others can reveal to you that what you take to be comfort at any stage is discomfort, and these discoveries never come to an end.’
He was absolutely right.
For example, when you sleep every night in a backpacker tent, your idea of comfort is a hostel bed, a proper cooker, and a table and chairs. When you sleep every night in a hostel, your idea of comfort is your own little house with its own little kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. When you live in your own little house, your idea of comfort is a big house with a designer kitchen, more en-suite bedrooms than you know what to do with, and a double garage.
And even when you have all of that, you still find yourself hankering after further comforts: better TVs, faster broadband, reclining armchairs, plusher carpets . . .
However much you have, you will always want more.
This insatiable hunger for ever-greater levels of comfort is fuelled, in large part, says Hegel, by ‘others’, by the people around you who have bigger, better, nicer stuff than you do, and by the advertisers whose mission in life is to convince you that nobody in their right mind could possibly be content with the stuff you have right now.
Epicurus understood that. That’s why he and his disciples moved outside the city, away from ‘others’ and out of temptation’s way.
Epicurus also understood that you pay for your comforts. And not just with money. You pay for them with long hours at the office, work-related stress, frenetic family life, and lack of time and energy for the things that really interest you.
Far better, he argued, to learn to be content with what is sufficient rather than to be constantly striving for more. ‘Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little,’ he said.
Or, as Gensei put it, ‘The point in life is to know what’s enough.’
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.
I recalled that I had felt the same way twenty years previously while walking in the Lake District. I was in my early thirties at the time, and undergoing a crisis of faith.
I had grown up believing that there is a God and a Devil, that Christians go to Heaven while everyone else goes to Hell, that the Bible is right about everything, and that one day – probably very soon – Jesus will come again.
Needless to say, I had the occasional pang of doubt about all of this. But up until my late twenties I managed to keep on believing nonetheless. However, as my twenties gave way to my thirties, I found that my doubts had become too big to brush under the carpet any more. I had to face them.
If I could resolve my doubts – and I sincerely hoped that I could – then I could carry on believing. But otherwise . . .
So it was that I found myself, for the first time, questioning the beliefs that had guided every aspect of my life up until then. It was an intensely stressful and confusing time. I was tied up in so many intellectual and emotional knots that I scarcely knew what – or even how – to think. I felt so burdened and distressed that I wondered if I could ever be happy again.
But, in the middle of it all, I took a fortnight’s camping holiday, alone, in the Lake District.
Each day, I would walk through the countryside and allow my thoughts to wander freely. And slowly, surely, and simply, the knots began to unravel. I began to understand who I was and what kind of person I wanted – needed – to become.
Mostly, it was the solitude that helped me to gain clarity. During twenty-odd years in the fundamentalist church, I had acquired a whole host of significant others – pastors, elders, teachers, preachers, house-group leaders, worship leaders, congregation members, friends, and relatives – who all had very strong opinions about who I was and what kind of person I ought to become. With all of their noise and clamour and expectation, I found it impossible to think, or even to feel, for myself. But away from them all, alone in the forests and beside the lakes, I began to discern the beating of my own heart.
Solitude, by itself, though, wouldn’t have been enough. It wouldn’t have brought me the stillness and clarity that I needed. The walking was important too.
There is something about walking – the steady, unhurried rhythm, the gentle stimulation of heart and lungs, and the pleasant synchronization of mind and body – that soothes the spirit and frees the mind.
This is especially true of walking in the countryside, where the quiet beauty of the surroundings soothes the spirit still further, and where the wide-open spaces offer still greater freedom to the mind.
It was during the second week of that camping trip that I discovered Plato.
One of the things that the solitude and the walking helped me to realize was that I needed to widen my intellectual horizons. I needed to expose myself to some new ideas, and start thinking things through for myself.
So, when I saw a battered old copy of Plato’s Republic in a second-hand bookshop, I bought it.
I knew nothing about Plato, except that he was an Ancient Greek, and that he was a philosopher. But ‘philosopher’ meant thinker – and that’s what I wanted to be.
So I started at page one, and I read the Republic.
It wasn’t what I expected (though I’m not sure what I did expect). It turned out to be a dialogue – a play, of sorts – in which the character Socrates discusses the concept of justice with a bunch of other chara
cters.
It was hard work, and I didn’t understand it all. But it excited me anyway, because it exposed me to a whole new way of trying to understand the world.
Socrates and his companions didn’t just tell each other what to think. They reasoned with one another. They talked, and they listened, and they thought things through.
It was the complete opposite of everything I had ever known. And it was brilliant.
For the rest of the week, I carried that battered old copy of the Republic with me, and I walked with Plato.
Plato introduced me to philosophy; and philosophy introduced me to Epicurus, Bertrand Russell, William James, Gensei, Hegel, and all of the other great thinkers that have kept me company ever since.
Walking over Rannoch Moor was a joy, but I had little time to savour it. Not so much because the ten-mile crossing of the moor made up only half of the day’s journey, leaving plenty of ground still to cover, but rather because the Rannoch midges descended upon us in a feeding frenzy whenever we tried to stop or slow our pace.
Having crossed the moor, we walked for nine miles along the floor of the glen to the Pine Trees Leisure Park in the tourist village of Tyndrum. There, for reasons I can’t recall, we splashed out on a ‘hiker hut’ (a wooden shed, complete with twin beds, electrical sockets, and a kettle) rather than pitching our tent.
The next stage of the West Highland Way, a thirteen-mile jaunt through farmland, forests, and riverside paths, from Tyndrum to Inverarnan, passed quickly and pleasantly.
As I walked along, not at all focusing on, but nonetheless enjoying, the varied scenery, I found myself musing on what it is about the countryside that is so soothing to the spirit and so refreshing to the soul. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Or, at any rate, I couldn’t put it into words.
I felt that it had something to do with the space, with the openness of the fields and the sky. And I felt that it had something to do with the gentle, almost imperceptible, pace at which things change.
