| The Great Glen Way | |
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Compulsory smoothies ....
Breakfast was a sociable affair — all of us gathered around a single large table, the GGW Circus members filling the remaining seats with good-natured energy. Bohemian Girl was among them, along with several of her colleagues, and the meal was accompanied by more conversation than we had managed at any previous breakfast of the week. The girl seated opposite Bod was, I noted privately, exceptionally attractive. I mentioned this to him afterwards, suggesting he had at least enjoyed a pleasant view over his porridge.
"Oh," he said, with genuine surprise. "I had breakfast?"
The food itself was passably good, with one significant exception. The Formidable Landlady had taken considerable pride in presenting each guest with a homemade smoothie — fresh ingredients, natural produce, made that very morning. She announced this with the proprietary satisfaction of someone who has found perfection and intends to share it whether invited to or not. The smoothie in front of me was the colour and approximate consistency of something I would normally take to a doctor. I am not, and have never been, a supporter of smoothies: the look, the texture, the sickly sweetness, the bitty residue that clings to the glass long after the contents have gone — none of it recommends the experience. I stared at mine for a moment, then drank it. Every gloopy mouthful. The Formidable Landlady had a quality about her that made resistance seem inadvisable.
Colin had not touched his. This was spotted immediately.
"Who's not had their smoothie?" she demanded, in the tone of a teacher conducting a register.
Colin owned up.
"What's wrong with it?"
"What's in it?" he asked, with the slightly resentful air of a man who has been put on the spot in front of an audience.
"Bananas and kiwi fruit!" she declared, as though the question itself were an imposition.
"Ah," said Colin, with the reasonable calm of someone who has just located an exit. "I'm afraid I can't have kiwi fruit. I'm allergic."
"Och!" She removed the offending glass with a roll of the eyes directed, as a general communiqué, at the rest of the table. "I'll make you one with strawberries instead." I watched Colin begin to decline and then think better of it. She was a woman of fixed purpose and the smoothie was coming regardless. He drank the strawberry version with the stoicism of a man who knows when he has been outmanoeuvred.
We assembled our gear on the small patio in front of the house, competing for space with the Circus members doing likewise, a baggage collection van, and the Circus's support staff ensuring that their charges were properly provisioned for the day ahead. It was, by some margin, the busiest scene Invermoriston had witnessed in recent memory. We popped into the village shop to buy lunch — a transaction of about three minutes — and emerged to find the GGW Circus had vanished entirely. Not a trace. No support vehicles, no walkers, nothing. The village had reabsorbed them completely. We stood and looked at each other.
How was this even possible?
Zig zags ....
We had been warned about the zig-zags — mentioned by one of the musicians the previous evening in a tone that suggested they warranted the name. In my imagination they were a forest trail of the switchback variety, climbing through trees in long leisurely traverses. In reality they were a tarmac road of meaningful gradient, ascending the mountain behind the hotel in six distinct hairpins that made the angle of each turn perfectly clear. By the third, I was regretting the smoothie. By the sixth, I was regretting several life decisions more broadly. The rooftops of Invermoriston diminished below us and the tree canopy closed in overhead and eventually, mercifully, the gradient levelled.
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Loch Ness |
“Good morning!” she trilled as she breezed by.
They are, as I have observed before on these walks, a tough breed in the Highlands.
The trail delivered us back into the presence of Loch Ness — glimpsed through the trees as we climbed, cobalt blue and impossibly still. A small detour sign advertised a stone seat and viewpoint, and we took it without much deliberation, scrambling up a short rough track to a hillock where someone had assembled a rough bench from local stone. The view across the loch and onto the mountains beyond was exactly what it promised. We sat in early sunshine and said very little, which is the correct response to that kind of view.
It was during this pause that I arrived, aloud, at a conclusion I had been circling since breakfast.
"It was her eyes," I said. "Bulbous. They un-nerved me."
Bod made a noise that indicated immediate recognition. "I thought exactly the same thing but I wasn't going to say it."
We made our way back down to the route.
"So," said Colin, negotiating the tricky descent with care. "Eight point two?"
The Rating System. We had forgotten it entirely for the past twelve hours.
"It would have been," I said. "Minus points for the eyes."
Nobody disagreed.
What comes down ....
The morning settled into the particular rhythm of the Great Glen Way at its most agreeable: long, gentle trails through old forest, Loch Ness appearing and disappearing through the trees, the kind of walking that requires just enough attention to keep you present
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Ness panorama |
We descended gradually — losing all the height gained on the zig-zags, as Offa's Dyke had taught me to expect from any route that takes its topography seriously — until we were level with the loch again, where a pumping station straddled a frothing torrent at a junction of paths. The forest rose steeply to the left. The loch lay to the right. Ahead, the trail climbed back up through the trees.
..... must go up
The long ascent that followed was the longest of the week and, paradoxically, among the most enjoyable. The gradient was moderate and consistent — a steady, patient pull rather than a series of demands — and the views opened with each hundred feet gained, until the loch was spread far below us in one of those Highland panoramas that make the effort feel not just worthwhile but necessary. To have seen this from the road would have been impossible.
At the summit an information board explained that the white smudge on the far shore was Foyers, where an aluminium smelting plant had operated in the late nineteenth century before transferring its operations to Kinlochleven. Kinlochleven, where the West Highland Way walked us past a vast abandoned factory on a never ending afternoon in 2006. These things connect, over the years, in ways you don't expect when you start out.
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The long climb |
"And the Highlands used to be as high as the Himalayas," he added, completing my geological digression from memory and disappearing around a bend.
We noticed the ant nests among the trees — hundreds of them, built from pine needles, ranging from modest hummocks to man-sized structures. One had colonised the path's edge, spilling down a rock face in a complex arrangement that suggested considerable civil engineering. The ants themselves were substantial — thumbnail-sized, with jaws that looked as though they meant business.
Colin has a phobia about ants. I encouraged him to push his fingers into the nearest nest. To his considerable credit, he tried. He withdrew his hand with two or three ants running over it, and produced a sound I had not previously heard from him — something between a retch and a bark, accompanied by a vigorous shaking of both hands in the manner of someone performing an anxious version of the Funky Chicken. The ants, unimpressed, went about their business.
We found a grass verge by a small gravel track for lunch and sprawled out in the sunshine with the grateful looseness of people whose legs have been given permission to stop. It was peaceful and warm and very quiet.
"Bastard!" said Bod, suddenly and with some force.
He spat a piece of corned beef sandwich onto the ground. It hit the grass, rolled twice, and appeared — for a moment — to continue under its own momentum and fly off into the trees. A wasp had been sharing his lunch without announcement and, finding itself transported toward a mouth, had registered its objection in the only vocabulary available to it. Bod had been stung on the inside of his lower lip.
The lip swelled steadily over the next hour until it had achieved a fullness that would not have been out of place on a stadium stage in the 1970s. For the rest of the afternoon Bod wore a distinctly Jagger-esque expression — not unattractive, if one adjusted one's frame of reference. We expressed our concern thoroughly and sincerely, after we had finished laughing.
The long road to South Lewiston .....
The route moved inland after lunch, away from Loch Ness and onto cultivated farmland — straight roads, neat fields of corn and barley and cabbage, ancient hedgerows. No Great Glen Way markers had appeared for some time and the road ahead stretched to a vanishing point with no obvious confirmation that we were still on route. There were no alternatives to take, however, so we marched on with the confidence of people who have no other option.
In one field a collection of abandoned farm machinery oxidised quietly in the corner — a tractor and several multi-bladed contraptions in a state of comprehensive decline. It is a sight I have encountered from Cornwall to Caithness, and I have never satisfactorily explained it. Bod studied the wreckage for a moment.
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A long straight road |
He walked on a few paces, then turned back.
"And an eyesore!"
I fell behind the others on a long stretch of road walking, a comfort break opening the gap and the pace of tarmac encouraging me to slow down. Colin shrank to a distant white baseball cap and then disappeared around a bend. For a while I walked alone, chaperoned on either side by woodland of a specifically unsettling character — ghostly grey pines, old and half-toppled, propped against each other, their boughs festooned with long wispy drapes of lichen hanging like old men's beards. Nothing grew at ground level. The light through the canopy was dim and green. A modern detached house stood in a clearing, trampolines and bicycles on the lawn, children's things — and yet the atmosphere around it was remote and lonely in a way that made me glad I didn't live there. For several miles these trees pressed in on either side of the road and I counted my steps between fixed points — a shadow, a puddle, a particularly deformed tree — in the way that tired walkers do when the end is still some distance off and the mind needs something small to aim for.
Eventually the trees thinned, the road curved, and I came around a bend to find Bod and Colin standing at a gap in a stand of oaks, looking down into a green valley.
In search of Drumnadrocht .....
We thought at first it was Drumnadrochit. The map said it was South Lewiston. A pretty village, no question, and we descended into it along a path following a lively little river that chuckled over shallow pebbles in the agreeable manner of rivers that have somewhere to go and are enjoying the journey. Drumnadrochit was still a few miles further, which is the kind of information that lands differently when you have already decided the day is over.
Bod had found a rest area on the river bank — picnic tables under an old stone bridge — and was seated at one, studying the water.
"Let's go and sit at the next table with our backs to him," I suggested to Colin.
This was childish. We were both tired and the idea was funnier than it had any right to be. We sat with our backs to Bod for approximately ninety seconds before he looked up and caught us, offering us an expression that was so dead pan it was withering.
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Lewiston |
I stretched out on a clean bed, updated Twitter via the free wi-fi, and tried not to dwell on the fact that tomorrow was the last day. The week was flying by in exactly the way that good things do.
A walk to the village shop added two miles to the day's total, which I noted without complaint — it was a pleasant stroll through the neighbourhood, and at the end of it there was a cash machine, a convenience store, and, entirely unexpectedly, an Indian restaurant from which smells of considerable promise drifted into the street. The cash machine was particularly welcome. The Great Glen Way had been kinder to our legs than previous routes but considerably harder on our wallets, the early finishes and unexhausted evenings having created conditions favourable to making merry.
In the sun room on my return I found Mark and Carol passing through en route to South Lewiston for dinner, and fell into conversation with our landlady about the grove of large tree stumps visible through the window. They were all that remained of a stand of mature beeches — a local landmark for generations, part of the grounds when the property was still a farm. Within a year of opening the guest house she had noticed the trees beginning to fail. Experts identified Honey Fungus: lethal, irreversible, and capable of remaining in the soil for years after the trees are gone. The beeches had to be felled, at considerable cost, and no replacements could be planted until the ground was clear. She told this story without self-pity but with a quiet sadness that was entirely appropriate. I kept finding my eyes drawn to the stumps as we talked, which is what happens when something that should be there isn't.
Sad café .....
The musicians in Invermoriston had recommended a pub called the Lever in Drumnadrochit, promising a lively evening. I mentioned it to the landlady. She was not in a position to recommend it — unfamiliar with its precise location, uncertain of its merits — but she had an alternative. A restaurant on the shore of Loch Ness, she said. Wonderful food. Free transport both ways. We agreed without much resistance. The Lever would have required us to locate it first, and we had been walking all day.
The journey along the A82 was longer than anticipated — we appeared to be approaching Inverness by the time we arrived — and the venue, when we reached it, was not quite what the description had suggested. It was a large modern hotel. The first thing visible from the car park was the gift shop: *All Things Nessie*, said the sign, and it meant it. Nessie key rings, Nessie pencils, Nessie tea towels, plastic Nessie statues in several sizes. We went inside with the equanimity of people who have made their arrangements and cannot now unmake them.
The bar was quiet in the specific way that large hotels are quiet — not peaceful, just empty of atmosphere. The restaurant had a wall of glass overlooking the loch, which was genuinely worth having as the light faded over the water and the navigation lights of leisure craft traced slow lines across the dark surface. We discussed, over dinner, the option we had considered during planning: a ferry across the loch to walk the eastern shore into Inverness. The eastern route was said to be prettier, with the Falls of Foyers among its highlights. We talked it through and concluded that the ferry would take us backwards as well as across, adding miles to an already substantial final day, at a cost our remaining funds could not absorb. The official route it was.
The food was reasonable. The bar afterwards was quiet, in the way that the restaurant had been quiet, in the way the whole evening was quiet in a manner that made the lively hotel bar in Invermoriston feel like a different century. We played pool. I failed comprehensively at a general knowledge machine. We ordered our taxi home. Outside, waiting, I fell into conversation with a couple from Shropshire — first-time visitors to Scotland, spending the week on a cousin's estate: deer stalking, salmon fishing, a gymkhana the following morning. They were the kind of people who occupy a different social stratum without making it awkward, and we had a perfectly pleasant conversation. I mentioned the Victorian mansion in Keith where I had once stayed. They were impressed. I felt, briefly, that I was holding my end up for the Great Unwashed rather well.
Their chauffeured Jaguar arrived and they waved enthusiastically from the window as it pulled away.
The bar manager drove us back through the dark to Drumnadrochit, bemoaning the summer's weather and its effect on visitor numbers. I asked who came to Scotland most these days.
"Used to be Americans," he said. "Now it's Chinese. And Arabs — they actually come for the cold and the rain."
We let ourselves into the quiet guest house and went to bed. Eighteen miles tomorrow.
The last day.
Daily Tweets
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
Haven't had a phone signal when in the village. Now on viewpoint above Loch Ness. Trek uphill was turbulent, so soon after breakfast.
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
Feet currently feel as if I've been given a pedicure, using a tent mallet. No new blisters, just sore & tender.
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
Now resting in our room in Drumnadrochit. Best day in terms of views along the length of Loch Ness. Fantastic.
Twitter from @Darkfarmowl (Mark)
18 miles left to complete the Great Glen Way :)
Twitter from @Darkfarmowl (Mark)
Met some good people along the way. Sad its over soon.
Twitter from @Darkfarmowl (Mark)
But also, part of me will be glad to see home again.
See Route on ......
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