| The Great Glen Way | |
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Leaving Fort William ....
I woke refreshed and found Colin and Bod already seated in the dining room, working through the business of breakfast with unhurried precision. Two Scottish women at a nearby table were heading home that day, having completed the West Highland Way, and we fell into conversation over bacon and eggs in the easy manner that shared walking experience tends to produce. They had loved every mile of it and were already planning their next long-distance route. They had never heard of the Great Glen Way — a response, we would discover, that was surprisingly common throughout the week — and wanted to know what it involved. We told them it had three lochs joined by a large canal, a difficult bit toward the end, and finished in Inverness. This was, at that point, more or less the full extent of our knowledge, and we felt it was enough.
Breakfast earned a solid eight out of ten — a rating system we invented on the spot and then applied, with the dedicated pointlessness of people who have been given too much time to think, to every accommodation for the rest of the week. The fried haggis, served as a matter of course in a Scottish full breakfast, was a particular pleasure for Bod and me. Colin, maintaining a health-conscious position that I admired and doubted in equal measure, ordered something considerably less cholesterol-laden — scrambled egg on toast, possibly. I gave him a week before the haggis won.
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An impressive start |
We lugged our bags into the foyer to be collected by the baggage forwarding service — one of the considerable pleasures of this particular walk — and went out onto the terrace to don boots and rucksacks while the guests still at breakfast observed us through the picture window with the mild curiosity of people watching something they have no intention of joining. The two Scottish women came out to see us off, which was kind. One of them pressed an unused roll of grey duct tape into my hands.
"Some long-distance runners recommended it to me at the start of our walk," she said. "They swear by it for blisters. I used it all week and had no problems at all. This one's still wrapped — you take it."
I thanked her and took it. She then insisted on a photograph with Bod and me. She was a small woman and we flanked her on either side like a pair of improbable bookends. In the photograph, she must look either impossibly tiny or we must look absurdly large. Possibly both.
Caol, canoes and canals ....
The official starting point of the Great Glen Way was a short walk from the B&B, and worth the detour. I have, over the years, developed a fairly bleak view of the markers used to denote the beginnings and ends of long-distance paths. The granite obelisk at Milngavie — the start of the West Highland Way — set an early standard that everything since has struggled to match. The West Highland Way itself ended in a cheap plywood affair resembling the finishing post of a small horse race. The Offa's Dyke path favoured lumpen brown boulders of the fly-tipped variety. The Kintyre Way offered nothing whatsoever, which felt like a particular injustice given what that walk put people through.
The Great Glen Way had installed a ten-foot wafer of dressed sandstone carved into elegant curves at its crown and inlaid with colourful plaques telling you everything you might want to know about the journey ahead. It even had photographs. I stood and looked at it with something approaching awe. The Great Glen Way initiative had really thought about this, and it showed.
We set off out of Fort William into what I knew from a previous visit — driving support duties during a Three Peaks weekend — would be an unremarkable opening hour. Today's official route was more pleasant than the flood-diverted back streets I had navigated before, following little bays formed by the River Lochy and passing through young plantations of rowan and birch. Ben Nevis, loomed to the south, its summit wrapped in smoky white cloud, indifferent to our passage.
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Coran Fearna mirrored in the River Lochie |
It was our first proper view of the walk and it deserved the attention we gave it. The village of Caol ran along the edge of Loch Linnhe, where the headland of Corran Fearna and the dome of Rubha Dearg island reflected in water of almost improbable blue. We stood and looked at it for a while in the way that people do when something is better than they were expecting. We were joined briefly by a Giant Schnauzer and its owner — a woman fortunate enough to live in one of the houses overlooking the bay, and sufficiently aware of this fortune to mention it cheerfully and without any apparent guilt. She walked with us for a while, agreeing that yes, her view was rather exceptional, and eventually called her dog back and wished us luck. I bent down to say farewell to the Schnauzer. He responded by running his large, warm tongue the full length of my face and then bounding away. He had, I became aware almost immediately, been eating something of considerable pungency, the precise nature of which I preferred not to speculate about. The smell remained on my cheek, slathered and committed, for a considerable distance.
I had expected something on a grander scale — a Scottish Suez, perhaps, bisecting the Highlands with appropriate drama. Where we stood the canal, in physical dimensions, was not dramatically larger than the Grand Union or the Kennet and Avon. In aesthetics, however, it more than held its own: avenues of trees lining the embankments, gleaming white ironwork at the locks, the water a deep, dark stillness. It would be our frequent companion for the next six days, and the introduction was promising. It was entirely deserted of boat traffic, which it remained for the rest of the day, and we set off along the well-made gravel towpath heading north-east under a blue sky with a pleasant sense of the week opening up ahead.
I began, in fairly short order, to fall behind.
This is a pattern I have come to accept with equanimity over the years of walking with these two. Bod has a pace I cannot match without guaranteeing blisters; a slow, rolling, ground-eating stride of perfect efficiency that he maintains regardless of gradient.
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The canal and the river |
Two canoeists appeared on the canal and became, involuntarily, my companions for the morning. They moved at roughly walking pace, which meant we traded position repeatedly throughout the day — I would pull ahead, stop for a photograph, they would glide past with a nod, I would overtake them again at the next lock. They began to look faintly self-conscious each time I passed, as though being repeatedly overtaken by a man on foot was a navigational judgement they were still processing. I thought they had the better idea. Row all the way to Inverness? I would have taken that arrangement happily enough.
Two women ahead of us appeared to be heading in the same direction. We couldn't confirm they were Great Glen Way walkers but their pace and bearing suggested purpose, and we would encounter them at intervals throughout the week. We came to know them as the Cinderella Sisters, for reasons lost to obscurity.
We broke for lunch near a small lock keepers cottage at a place called Torcastle, where we came across a convenient trestle table, and calculated an early finish to this first day. Bod didn’t have an OS map of this route and seemed to be missing its presence. He asked for Colin’s guide book, which carried a reasonable map of the route, and pored over it contentedly whilst he munched his sandwiches.
I shot some video, pointing the camera at the prettiness of Torcastle as the canoeists made a final, dignified pass, and I speculated on the pleasant if unremarkable walking we had experienced so far.
Commando crawl ....
After lunch we settled into a gentle walking rhythm again. We reached a stretch where the canal path was flanked on one side by the canal itself and on the other by the surging River Lochy; a much more dynamic river here at its upper reaches. Low green mountains chaperoned us to the north whilst pleasant open countryside rolled away eastwards, dotted here and there by farmhouses and crofters cottages. The miles ticked by, and soon we had walked into Gairlochy, a quiet little place consisting of a few dwellings and a swing bridge spanning the canal. We calculated an early finish to the day — twelve miles covered, four remaining to Spean Bridge — and had a brief discussion about whether to stop or continue. Bod expressed an interest in the Commando memorial at Lochaber which settled the matter. We would walk on, making sixteen miles in total, which felt appropriately ambitious without being punishing.
The additional four miles were road walking — a fact we discovered gradually and with diminishing enthusiasm. The route climbed above the River Lochy, now a wide, fast, shallow thing of the kind that makes salmon fishermen stand thigh-deep in cold water with expressions of deep contentment, and then continued east along a road that unravelled before us in an almost perfectly straight line, offering an entirely unambiguous view of how far we still had to go.
The Grampians held the southern horizon with considerable dignity, Ben Nevis still wearing its crown of clouds, and the light on the hills was doing the things Highland light does when it decides to be beguiling. I made several stops — partly just to admire the scenery, partly to remind myself, on legs that were beginning to register the extra miles, that this was a fine afternoon in a fine part of the world and I was fortunate to be in it.
Bod and Colin arrived at the memorial several minutes before I did, as was becoming customary. The Commando Memorial is an impressive piece of work — three stone soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder on a broad plinth, gazing out over the landscape in which they trained before their first operations against the Axis powers in 1940. The commandos were formed here, in this wild and unforgiving country, because the country itself was part of the point. What the landscape could do to a man in peacetime it could also prepare him to withstand in war.
More affecting than the main memorial were the smaller ones accumulated around it — photographs, handwritten notes, home-made crosses, posies of flowers — placed by families and comrades in memory of soldiers who had served in the commandos and not come home, a significant number of them from recent operations in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The memorial was busy, people of many nationalities moving quietly through it. I found myself, somewhat disrespectfully, wishing for an ice-cream van, and immediately felt guilty about it.
We spoke briefly with the Cinderella Sisters, who confirmed they were also heading for Spean Bridge, and who pointed out the path alongside the A82 that we had been failing to locate. The last few miles wound steadily downhill until the houses and shops of Spean Bridge appeared, and our B&B with them — a well-appointed house of contemporary design, scrupulously clean, and very welcoming. I flopped onto the bed with the specific gratitude of a body that has just been informed it may stop now.
Spean a long day ....
Time, that rarest of luxuries on a long walk, was available in some quantity. A shower. A cup of tea. A genuine sit-down. I took a wander around the garden and found hens clucking companionably in an old coop. Fresh eggs for breakfast, then. A pleasant thought. The evening took us first to a cash machine, which turned out to be empty — a development that compressed my financial outlook until Fort Augustus — and then, on grounds of economy, to the fish and chip shop where you could sit outside. It was an odd little establishment: nonchalant service, presentation that defied easy categorisation. I ordered a pickled onion and received it in a sealed tin foil container, as though it were a medical specimen requiring careful handling. However the food was adequate and we were hungry, and that was good enough.
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Bod and Colin relaxing at the end of day one |
At some point a group of local musicians arrived and played Celtic music to a genuinely appreciative audience. One of them, a young woman, was particularly accomplished on the harp.
Bod, who had been studying a large engineering drawing of the Forth Bridge on the wall opposite with growing attention, leaned forward after a while.
"If I started colouring that in," he mused, "when I got to the end, would I have to start again?"
This is the kind of remark that Bod produces with the timing and delivery of a man who has been thinking about it for some time and has waited for exactly the right moment. It landed, as his remarks tend to, without requiring any follow-up.
Later I found myself in conversation in the gents with a man from London who was enthusing about his holiday and wanted to know if we were touring by car or bus. When I said we were walking he looked briefly perplexed, in the way that people do when they suspect they have misheard. I explained about the Great Glen Way — he had never heard of it, which was entirely consistent — and he confessed to finding the prospect of seventy-three miles in six days somewhat bracing.
We had a few more beers than we had strictly planned, or budgeted for, and walked back through the quiet streets of Spean Bridge with the satisfied looseness of a first day well completed. I was sharing a room with Bod, so I installed the wax ear defenders with the careful thoroughness of a man who has been here before, and fell asleep almost immediately.
If I snored, he never mentioned it. My last thought before unconsciousness took over was a simple and contented one: five whole days still ahead, and the best yet to come.
Daily Tweets
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
I had the pleasure of bod's enormous snores, but slept fine thanks to some gooey ear plugs.
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
Now off for our first day's jaunt, to Spean Bridge. Weather seems to be favouring us.
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
Lunch at . . . .don't know where. The day contains plenty of sunshine and a few foot hot spots. Very pretty scenery here, discounting my walking companions.
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
Just finished. Had a 4 mile trudge off route, to our digs. All on hard road.
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
Today, we walked through the suburbs of Fort William & along the Caledonian Canal. Ben Nevis looked on over our efforts.
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
Staying at the Distant Hills View B&B: very modern and clean-looking. Time for a coffee. @Darkfarmowl has gone for a power nap & bod is reading. I've retired to my room to rest my throbbing knee & watch spiderman 2.
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
Showered, shaved & 1st aid administered to feet, which basically amounted to mummifying my left little toe in plasters. Painfully reminiscent of the Kintyre Way. I have the single room tonight, o yas.
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
A fish & chip supper is on the cards, possibly with a cheeky visit to a local bar.
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
Ate a venison burger, which tasted no different than the bovine variety.
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
A fine evening filled, I suspect, with far more ale than was good for us, considering tomorrow we have to walk.
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
14 mile walk to Laggan tomorrow, with Loch Lochy as a constant critic. Really must consider sleep as a positive option.
See Route on ......
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