| The Great Glen Way |
By Mark Walford
Day Six
Route: Drumnadrochit to Inverness
Distance: 20m (32km)
Elevation: 20ft (7m) to 1,250ft (381m)
Climbing (ascent and descent): 1,778ft (542m) and 1,906ft (581m)
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Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet ....
Breakfast on the last morning was taken in the conservatory, where windows offered splendid views across to distant hills — the very hills, our landlady informed us cheerfully, that we would be climbing before too long. Mark and Carol joined us and we conducted a light-hearted review of the week over bacon and eggs, the kind of conversation that only makes sense at the end of something.
We asked if they had seen anything more of the large American and his wife. They had, it transpired, spoken to them several times. The big man was doing all the walking. His wife was acting as driver, baggage courier, and general support — the precise reverse of what we had assumed on first impressions.
"He power walks," Mark said. "Almost runs. Makes him drip with sweat. And he tackles each day from the endpoint back to the start — walking the route in reverse." A pause. "You'll probably see him today."
We wondered how a man of that build generated that kind of speed without serious cardiac consequences. Perhaps underneath the considerable exterior there beat the heart of a former athlete. He certainly had the frame of an American footballer. We might never know.
Mark was looking forward to celebrating his birthday in Inverness that evening and intended, he said, to mark the occasion properly. I hoped we would catch up with them later. We didn't, as it turned out. It was the last we saw of them.
We said farewell to our excellent hosts — 8.7 on the Rating System — and stepped out into the longest day of the week. The weather had views about this. Rain threatened on and off from the start, settling fairly quickly into a steady drizzle that established itself as the day's governing condition. We walked through Drumnadrochit in waterproofs, stopped at the
local shop
for lunch supplies and another visit to the cash machine, and then followed the A82
out of town.
A heavy downpour earlier had left substantial puddles along the roadside verge, and the morning rush hour was moving through them at speed. We were on a narrow footpath with nowhere to go. The collision of elements — Colin, a very large puddle, and a passing truck — was, in retrospect, mathematically inevitable. I watched it happen with the fatalism of a man who has seen the numbers line up and knows the outcome. The truck threw a wide arc of water. Colin walked into it. He stopped, shook himself in the manner of a wet Labrador, and directed an angry and entirely futile gesture at the departing vehicle.
He was, at least, wearing Gore-Tex. And I wish I had had the camera ready.
Three’s company - thirty’s a crowd .....”
My legs announced their tiredness early, possibly in anticipation of what lay ahead, and I fell behind the others almost immediately. Walking alone in poor weather lacks the compensations of walking alone in good weather, and I trudged along wondering how many walkers had been soaked by passing traffic on this stretch, and entertaining modest fantasies about the bed I had recently left.
The A82 eventually released us onto a
narrow track
climbing into woodland, and I paused to record some video — began delivering what I considered a composed and atmospheric
piece of narration about the conditions — when a convoy of walkers appeared below me on the path and began making their way up. Thirty of them, at least. All ages. Led by an officious-looking guide at the front.
Once caught by a group of that size on a narrow path, you are committed for the rest of the day.
They move in a fluid formation that surrounds you regardless of whether you accelerate or slow down — a collective gravity that is very difficult to escape. I gave them five minutes' head start and set off. The guide had stopped the group at a point of interest. They formed a broad and cheerful obstruction across the full width of the path.
I wove through them.
'Scuse me'. 'Sorry'. 'Excuse me'. 'Sorry.' Once clear, I ran. Not a jog — a genuine, committed run, uphill, through the trees, until I was breathless and steaming under my waterproofs, and rounded a corner to find Colin standing still and staring upward into the branches of a tree, apparently absorbed by something in the canopy.
I told him about the convoy.
"What — those old biddies?" he said, with scorn. "Surely even you could outdistance
them, mate!"
I gave him the look this deserved and we walked on together, fast, until the convoy was far enough behind to stop mattering.
Things can only get wetter ....
Bod was waiting at the foot of what the guidebook had been building toward all week — the most challenging section of the route. A rough stony track twisted sharply upward through the trees in a series of switchback corners that demanded something between walking and scrambling. It was short, perhaps seven hundred feet, and steep, but I had covered worse ground on both the West Highland Way and Offa's Dyke, and we got up it without drama. The path widened at the top, levelled, and delivered us onto open moorland — gorse and heather, the first such terrain all week — where a chilly wind was organising squalls of rain and hurling them into our faces with some purpose.
A small farm sat in the shelter of a slate bluff, its nearest neighbour several miles away in any direction. I found myself thinking about it at length, because there was very little else up there to think about. Who lived there? What happened when things broke down? Did the post actually arrive? Did Tesco deliver? Did the hours stretch endlessly in a Highland winter, in the dark, with the wind off the loch?
We passed through a five-barred gate back into forest, and the trail began to descend. I stopped for photographs, and the usual consequence followed — the others disappeared into the trees and I walked alone. A moment later my rucksack made a sharp mechanical ping and the chest strap flew apart.
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Our final view of Loch Ness
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Cold fingers could not fix it. I continued with the pack balanced across one shoulder, swapping when the straps began to rub, conducting a low-level argument with the situation for the next several miles.
I rounded a corner and found the way ahead dropping into a narrow valley and a straight
metalled road.
Colin and Bod were already on it, small figures beetling purposefully along. Coming toward me at some speed, and apparently generating his own weather system, was the large American. Bandanna around his head, moving at a pace that made our walking look like standing still, sweating freely and visibly despite the rain. He passed with a cheerful *"Hiya!"* and crashed into the forest behind me like a minor force of nature. The man could shift.
The road went on for a considerable time and eventually I caught up with the others. We entered a camping and caravanning site, barely populated, and followed a small track hemmed in by hazel and hawthorn that emptied rainwater onto us each time we brushed against it.
Nailed to a post, a sign appeared.
**BOVRIL**
And then, a little further on, another.
**HOT TEA**
Out of context as they were, they had the quality of cries for help left by someone in distress. A sign at a junction offered a café down a side path. The thought of sitting somewhere warm with a hot drink was genuinely appealing. We looked at the miles remaining and pressed on.
Low point ....
A B road followed, running across
open heathland
with no shelter on either side. The wind arrived without obstruction. The rain, which had been intermittent, settled into something more committed and found the gaps in our waterproofs within twenty minutes. I fell behind, and this time the distance grew without the usual correction. Bod and Colin disappeared over a rise. I put my head down and walked.
The camera stayed in the bag. It was too cold and too wet for the camera.
After what felt like an extended portion of the afternoon — probably an hour — I crested a low hill to find Colin and Bod hunched against a five-barred gate, squinting into the rain and attempting to eat sandwiches. I took in the scene. They had chosen, as a lunch spot, the most exposed point currently available within eyesight.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Having lunch," they said, accurately.
On the horizon I could make out a line of green — trees, and the shelter that comes with them. I announced that I was not stopping here, retrieved my over-trousers from the rucksack, and began the difficult manoeuvre of pulling them on over wet clothes while standing on one leg. Bod walked over.
"Crap weather," he observed.
I agreed that it was, rested a boot on the gate rail to tie a lace, the foot slipped, and my forehead connected with the top bar of the gate with a prominent *BONG* — a sound so cartoonishly resonant that it deserved a speech bubble.
Bod stood wordlessly.
I straightened up, gritted my teeth, hoisted the broken rucksack onto one shoulder, and nodded at him.
"I'm off then."
"Righto."
A mile or so of road, then a stony track heading left toward the trees. The trees were further than they had appeared. They always are. I committed to the track anyway, passed a man in wilted tweeds who offered a curt greeting, and then a trio of young men in sodden tee shirts and shorts who stopped me to ask about conditions ahead. I told them there was a café two hours up the trail where they could dry out. This was exactly what they wanted to hear. They had arrived in Inverness the previous afternoon from London and were planning to rough-camp all the way to Fort William. Their clothing and kit were, to put it diplomatically, optimistic. Their enthusiasm, however, was faultless.
I walked on until the trees enclosed me, the wind dropped, and the rain reduced to a distant sound in the upper canopy. I found a log under a conifer, sat down, and had a solitary lunch in virtual silence — the only sounds the rustling of my crisp packet and the soft sigh of wind through branches far above.
Then I realised something had bitten me on the left bum cheek. A wood ant, in all probability, taking exception to being sat upon. A large and tender lump was already forming and sitting down was going to require a revised approach for the foreseeable future.
Two figures appeared in the distance, moving between the trees. I waited until they were within range.
"You took your f***ing time!" I called.
They were not Colin and Bod. They were two complete strangers who, if they heard me, chose not to respond to the content of the remark.
"You've got the right idea there," said one of them pleasantly, gesturing at my makeshit seat.
I responded with a sheepish thumbs up.
It's never too late to say you're soggy ....
I packed up and moved on, half convinced I had drifted off route. A sign nailed to a tree confirmed I was still heading toward Inverness. A blue marker post, appearing shortly after, confirmed the Great Glen Way was still underneath my feet. I suspected the others might have taken a wrong turn. I realised that it didn't matter either way.
All roads led to Inverness.
The forest here had a quality unlike anything else on the walk — tall, slender trees with high canopies, their trunks a striking ghostly grey, the rain having stopped and a faint mist hanging between them so that the further trees dissolved into indistinction.
Knee-high grass grew between the trunks in a vivid, saturated green, the only real colour in an almost monochrome scene. Overhead the boughs interlaced against a leaden sky in a pattern of considerable complexity, and the silence was of the kind usually associated with old stone buildings.
I took the camera out and did my best. Some places resist accurate capture and this was one of them. I was partway through filming a slow panorama when Colin and Bod came into view, walking toward me along the path. They walked past. I continued filming. None of us said anything. There was, I think, a faint atmosphere of minor grievance in circulation — nothing serious, nothing that would last, but the kind of low-pressure front that develops between people who have been cold and wet and each other's company for six days. I caught up with them a few minutes later.
I moaned about the weather and the cold road. Bod nodded. Colin offered me a swig of his water. We walked on. Male bonding: completed.
The ghostly forest eventually ended at a gate onto an old drover's road. Bod informed us this was the road that would carry us into Inverness. The rain resumed, gently. The usual formation reassembled itself — Bod in front, head slightly cocked, Colin twenty yards behind, myself bringing up the rear at a comfortable distance. It would have been a lovely finale on a different day — old forest on one side, hawthorn and rowan on the other, the feel of something drawing to a close. Today it was grey and dripping and we moved through it like men on a treadmill, the scenery rolling past us on invisible rollers.
The lovely lass o' Inverness ....
My legs had started to voice their position clearly by now, which was fair. Six days, seventy-three miles. They had been patient. But I had walked the week without a single blister — a personal first, attributable to some combination of new boots, duct tape, and the daily ritual of foot therapy conducted with the seriousness of a surgical procedure. Colin had spent much of the week in real discomfort, blisters and sore spots from boots that had served their time and were no longer supporting him properly. It is, as I have discovered on previous walks, one of the cruelest ironies of long-distance hiking: the boots you trust most are often the ones that have stopped being trustworthy.
We emerged from the drovers road onto a hillside to find
Inverness
spread below us — unexpectedly, and with some relief. The predominant
structure on the skyline was a large, soot-blackened granite edifice of imposing character. It had, on first inspection, the look of a Victorian prison. Far beyond it, across a sea of roof tiles and tree tops, there was a hint of something solid and crenellated. Inverness Castle. The end of our journey.
Which would have been more satisfying had it been nearer.
The Great Glen Way, apparently determined to ensure we had seen every corner of Inverness before concluding our business there, led us around the full periphery of the city — industrial estates, business parks, a housing estate where a small elderly woman waved at me from her front garden, a shopping precinct, a park, a golf course, a river. The city centre was consistently visible and consistently not getting any closer. We stopped on
a bridge
above the dark and turbulent Ness and rested on the railings in the manner of people who have temporarily misplaced their momentum.
"The trouble is," said Bod, staring into the water, "even when we get to the castle we still have to walk to the guest house. And that might be the other side of Inverness."
I took some video and complained about my legs, and we carried on.
Colin spotted the castle first. We limped up a final hill, crossed roads carrying the kind of traffic density we hadn't experienced since Fort William, and arrived at the
official end
of the route. The same elegant sandstone monolith as the one we had photographed at the start, 73 miles to the west. We leaned against it with the gratitude of people who have run out of anything else to lean against, slightly damp and unshaven and smiling regardless.
Three thirty in the afternoon. The walk was done.
Great Glen Waywardness ....
The castle, which no doubt has a long and fascinating history, was not our guest house and therefore received only the most cursory of acknowledgements.
We had scribbled directions from the landlady and set off across the road bridge into the city, three bedraggled figures in travel-worn walking clothes with the general appearance of men who had been sleeping in a doorway.
Colin stopped two women at a bus stop and asked for confirmation that we were heading the right way. We were not. They redirected us with the helpfulness of people who could see at a glance that we needed it.
Our final B&B was a solid Victorian granite house with leaded windows, tartan carpet, mounted stag heads, and watercolours of West Highland terriers — the full Scottish Experience, presented for the overseas market with admirable thoroughness. It was trying a little hard, but Inverness is a tourist destination and people want what they want.
The landlady was welcoming. She showed us our rooms. Then she produced her ace card: all rooms had baths.
*Baths.*
An immediate two-point bonus on the Rating System, unanimously awarded. I filled mine to the brim with the hottest water the plumbing could provide, lowered myself in, and remained there until the water had cooled and my skin had corrugated. Then I moved to the bed and slept deeply and dreamlessly for two hours.
When I woke I felt entirely new.
The landlady offered a recommendation for dinner and produced a voucher for a free drink. After the soulless hotel of two nights before we were cautious, but we accepted. The recommended restaurant was on the river, extremely busy, and asked us to come back in thirty minutes. It had a certain nouvelle cuisine ambiance that was somewhat at odds with our clothing and our general mood, and it had no bar. We spotted a
pub-diner
across the water called
Johnny Foxes,
assessed it as more our kind of place, and went there instead.
Johnny Foxes was large, lively, and served good food without ceremony. We ate well, found a table in the main bar, and settled in. At some point in the evening the pint glasses became plastic, bouncers materialised on the door, and a live act began working through a set of classic rock covers with reasonable competence. The place filled rapidly — every person in Inverness between sixteen and twenty-five appeared to have been notified — until it was heaving with colour and noise and the specific energy of a Friday night city centre pub.
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Colin and Bod at the finishing post
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We were in travel-worn walking gear, clean but not glamorous, surrounded by people who had made rather different choices with their Saturday evenings.
Being well past thirty made us effectively invisible, which was perfectly fine. We drank beer and watched proceedings with the detached appreciation of naturalists in a hide.
A man in full Highland dress danced with his partner to a Foreigner number, his kilt describing enthusiastic arcs around him. Two women at a nearby table were conducting a patient and methodical campaign to attract the attention of a couple of prosperous-looking older men. Colin had a brief encounter with the only hostility of the entire week — a remark about his accent that had the potential to become unpleasant — and defused it with the skill of a man who has navigated these situations before and knows the smoothest route out.
We drank an unwise quantity of beer, sang ourselves adequately hoarse, and walked home through the small hours — across the bridge, the Ness dark and silent below us, past the late-night pubs depositing their customers onto the pavements with varying degrees of grace, and finally into the B&B where our beds were waiting.
For the first time in a week, the Great Glen Way was not.
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