| The Great Glen Way | |
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A touch of class ....
I slept soundly and woke hungry; breakfast called. We took our seats in the dining room and turned our attention to the Rating System. I had devised, during the night, a revised and more sophisticated version — multiple categories, weighted scoring, a more nuanced approach to the guest experience. It seemed excellent while it existed only in my head. The moment I began to describe it, I could hear it collapsing. Bod noted, with the dry precision of a man who has identified the fatal flaw, that converting the existing scores into the new system would almost certainly require multiplying the old value by two, dividing by pi, and adding twelve percent. We reverted to the original system without further discussion and awarded the establishment a 5.8, subsequently revised upward to a 6 on the strength of the proprietor's behaviour during breakfast, which was entertainment of a high and entirely unintentional order.
Think Fawlty Towers. Specifically, the episode with Bernard Cribbins as the faux hotel inspector. Substitute our bluff Cumbrian host for Basil Fawlty, and the dining room in its entirety as a collective Cribbins.
He arrived with two bowls of porridge and set them before the couple opposite us.
"Here you go — porridge."
They regarded the bowls with the mild bewilderment of people who have not ordered porridge.
"We didn't order porridge."
"Yes you did."
"No we didn't."
Our Host looked toward the kitchen with an expression suggesting that the kitchen had a case to answer. "It says in there that you did."
"We did not order that."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. We are."
He sighed the sigh of a man surrounded by people who are making things unnecessarily difficult. "Oh well. I'll just have to give it to someone else then."
Mark and Carol arrived and smiled at us as they took a seat at the nearest vacant table. Our Host materialised at their elbow with the quiet approach of a man who has something to say.
"Now, you may not have noticed," he said, at a volume perfectly audible to the entire room, "but this table is set for three, whereas—" he gestured toward the corner, "that table is set for two. So where do you suppose you should be sitting?"
Mark — a younger, smoother-shaven David Baddiel — looked amused rather than offended. "Oh, you want us to move then?"
"Yes, if you would."
They moved. As they crossed the room, Our Host addressed the space behind them with the quiet conviction of a man thinking aloud: "You're not the brightest, are you?"
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Walking in the rain |
Breakfast arrived without further incident. Colin had something that probably involved goat's cheese and was definitively not a fry-up. The food was, at minimum, passably good.
We said goodbye to the Oxford men as we left the table. One of them had, over our brief time together, developed a voice of the jangly, insistent variety that accumulates on the nerves through prolonged exposure, allied to a personality that tended toward the pedantic. Colin had arrived at the same assessment independently, which confirmed it. We parted with genuine warmth and a private sense of relief.
Our landlady furnished us with a useful piece of intelligence before we left: there was a tea shop approximately halfway along the day's route, serving hot food and drinks. We filed this away with the gratitude of people who have already assessed the weather through the window.
The weather through the window was doing its best impression of Wet Tuesday.
Railway relics ....
We assembled our wet weather gear with the resigned competence of people who have been here before and set off along the A82 into wind and horizontal rain, traffic displacing sheets of water from the road surface onto us as it passed. It was a short section, which was the only thing to be said for it, and we turned off the road and under a canopy of trees with the relief of men escaping something unpleasant.
Almost immediately we found ourselves on a track running alongside the ghost of a railway line. Information boards explained its history: a privately funded line conceived to link Fort William with Inverness, as much needed then as now, that ran for a few short years before a succession of disputes between the companies contracted to run it destroyed the venture as comprehensively as any derailment could have. What remained were the embankments and the bridges and the old station platforms, their edges broken by decades of tree growth, the rails themselves long since lifted. The trains, in their brief operational life, would have passed at roughly head height to where we walked. The whole thing had the particular melancholy of infrastructure abandoned mid-ambition.
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Loch Oich |
"Awww bloody hell!" he said.
A few hundred yards further on I noticed an abandoned building sitting in the shelter of the embankment. Bod and Colin walked past it without breaking stride, collars up against the drizzle. I stopped.
It was a two-storey cottage, built to shelter railway maintenance workers in a time when the nearest alternative shelter was several miles in either direction. The rotting front door stood ajar. I went in.
A short passage. Two doors, one padlocked, one open. A rickety staircase to the upper floor. I took the open door and found myself in a large room with windows at both ends and a wide black iron fireplace dominating one wall. There was a mouldy sofa of considerable vintage, a strong smell of urine, and fly-specked glass through which I could see an impenetrable wall of brambles at the rear. I stood in it for a moment and tried to reconstruct what it had been — on a winter night, perhaps, with the fire lit and several men in from the cold, the clatter of crockery, the banter, the great noise of a passing train shaking the walls and receding into the dark glen. All gone. The room held only the echo of the idea.
Back in the passage I debated the padlocked door and the staircase. Then a muffled thump came from somewhere above, and the awareness that my companions were by now a considerable distance ahead of me resolved the debate. I left.
It was only once I was outside, some distance down the track, that I realised, to my annoyance, I had taken no photographs whatsoever.
Every broth you take ....
The track continued — loch to the left, embankment to the right, trees overhead providing imperfect but genuine shelter. We walked in the comfortable silence of people who have been in each other's company long enough to know that conversation doesn't always require filling. Bod and Colin paused at the remains of another stone bridge to peer into a deep ravine while I went ahead, in one of those intermittent phases of a long walk where the legs feel genuinely good and the pack feels light and the pace arrives without negotiation.
I descended a cinder track, turned a corner, crossed a long wooden footbridge, and found a stile with a notice advertising the café our landlady had mentioned. I waited for the others.
We skirted the northern end of Loch Oich — wide views back down the glen in the gaps between rain squalls — and moved across grassy meadows before rejoining the Caledonian Canal and stopping at a large swing bridge
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The Bridge of Oich |
The café was a short walk further — a large shed-like building set in a well-kept garden beside an elegant house, warm inside and smelling pleasantly of pine and beeswax. Tables and chairs, china, a large dresser, a pot-bellied stove doing useful work. The Scottish Lady was there, seated alone with a cup of tea, and we pulled up chairs and ordered tea and Scotch broth and settled in.
The broth, when it arrived, was exactly the right thing for exactly the right moment — hot, substantial, and deeply satisfying in the specific way that simple food is when you have been cold and wet and walking since morning. The proprietor, a friendly and welcoming woman, mentioned two things of note as we ate. First, that this was her last day of business before closing for the winter. Second, indicating subtly that we had limited time to dally, that the GGW Circus had booked all the tables and their advance party was due to arrive at any moment. Even as she said it, one of the Circus's support staff appeared to check preparations — a cheerful woman from New Zealand whom we recognised from previous encounters along the route. We took this as our cue, shouldered our damp rucksacks, and said farewell to the Scottish Lady, who was completing the walk a day ahead of us and whom we would not see again.
Brum and Breakfast ....
We prepared to set off along the canal but a small detour to the Bridge Of Oich seemed in order — an intriguing little suspension bridge in miniature, painted brilliant white, its spars giving it the look of an oversized harp or one of those string pictures made at school. Designed by James Dredge in 1854, using a double-cantilever system in which each end supported its own weight with minimal reliance on the centre. An information board provided a period drawing of two nineteenth-century gentlemen demonstrating this principle, rendered in a style that owed something to the theatrical.
We had briefly walked onto the wrong side of the canal — a navigational interlude involving someone's back garden and a confrontation with a caravan — before the detour set things right, and we pressed on toward Fort Augustus.
The next section of canal — approximately eight miles to Fort Augustus — will not be the most celebrated passage of this journal. It rained on and off. The wind blustered. The canal cut through groves of oak and poplar while the River Oich ran along below us, lower than the towpath and visible through long hedgerows of rowan and hawthorn. No boats used the canal. No other walkers used the towpath. I took some video, put the camera away for an hour, and took some more. The two pieces were, on later review, indistinguishable.
The outlying cottages appeared in mid-afternoon, and with them the realisation that the day was done earlier than expected.
Fort Augustus was the busiest place we had encountered since leaving Fort William — tourists moving between pubs and gift shops, boats negotiating the canal locks, a general purposeful bustle. We participated by visiting an ATM, which produced the cash the Laggan machine had withheld. Bod and Colin added a newsagent for a lottery ticket. Then we found our B&B.
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Approaching Fort Augustus |
We couldn't get into our rooms until after two, so we deposited our bags and walked back down to the canal, where a pub with a view of the canal lock invited us to sit with cold beer and watch the boats. The logistics of a busy lock, observed from the outside, have the quality of barely controlled chaos — ropes thrown at angles, instructions shouted across water, boats jockeying for position with the focused tension of vehicles in a multi-storey car park. Bod identified the largest vessel — a fishing boat, scallop dredger — whose five-man crew had taken the view that their size entitled them to bossing rights over every other craft in the lock, and exercised this view with no compromise.
Rain squalls blew in at intervals from the south, soaking everything for a few minutes before the sun returned and made it all steam gently. It was, despite the weather, deeply relaxing — the Great Glen Way revealing itself to be, as we had been hoping, a walk on which beer could be consumed in the afternoon without significant moral compromise.
Eventually it was time to return to the B&B and some R&R. I had the room to myself that night — a large, comfortable double with dormer windows looking onto the road — and I spent the afternoon on the bed reading newspapers and watching television with the unashamed contentment of a man who has earned it.
In the foyer a world map covered one wall, dotted with pins marking the home towns of overseas guests. The usual clusters: USA, Germany, France, the Antipodes, Japan. One pin stood alone — fixed to a remote town in north-eastern Mongolia, no neighbouring flag within five hundred miles. A silver mining town, the owners explained, prosperous enough to send its residents a long way from home. This struck me as one of the more pleasing facts of the week.
A young American woman arrived while we were studying the map and was informed by our host that her husband had already checked in. A very large American man came to greet her — he must have weighed three hundred pounds, and was emphatically not dressed for walking. We exchanged the sideways glances of people drawing an obvious inference. It was, as we discovered later, entirely wrong.
Three men in a bothie ....
We found a pub called The Bothie for dinner — the nearest place offering a table — and had an excellent fish and chips supper. We moved to the bar afterwards and arranged ourselves with our beers. A large television mounted on the wall was showing the England football match, its screen angled away from us but its reflection available in the window. More usefully, the bar staff were entirely visible, and their expressions provided a real-time commentary on proceedings. They were not, it was clear, cheering for England. Their set faces and intermittent winces told us that England, unusually, appeared to be playing rather well.
Colin was standing at the bar when England scored the winning goal. The groan from staff and customers was audible. Colin looked at me, took a slow survey of the room, and then — with the careful minimalism of a man executing a celebration in enemy territory — performed a slight bend of the knees, a small clenched fist, and a silently mouthed "Yesssss!"
It was a masterclass in restrained joy.
We walked back to the B&B refreshed, sat up for a while in the easy manner of people whose legs have nothing to complain about, and went to bed sleeping soundly. Four days gone. Three to go. The Great Glen, so far, had been nothing less than excellent.
Daily Tweets
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
Oops, looks a tad murky outside. Feet feel loads better this morning, after a period of rest & counselling. Walking along Loch Oich today.
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
A day of waterproofs, therefore marinating in my own sweat as I marched along. Feet have behaved, just a little sore.
Twitter from @Darkfarmowl (Mark)
Early finish in Fort Augustus. Soggy old day. Time to kill b4 beers.
. Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
Been finished for an hour. Now at Fort Augustus, being alternatively sun-drenched & rain-soaked as we sup beer by the lock-side.
Twitter from @Corriepaw (Colin)
Loch Oich was probably as pretty as advertised, couldn't really tell through the trees & the showers. Finished off with a stretch of canal.
See Route on ......
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