| The West Highland Way | |
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Profanity for breakfast ....
Breakfast time arrived with a curious layering of aromas. The elegant floral perfume of the previous evening’s lilies still lingered in the house, though it was now being aggressively undermined by the sharp, medicinal tang of Ralgex, which Colin and I had applied liberally to our protesting leg muscles before bed. The effect was rather as if a stately home and a third-division football dressing room had been forced into an uneasy cohabitation. We could only hope the smell would drift away after we left and not remain embedded in the curtains as a permanent memorial to our passing.
Overnight a weather front had marched in from the west with all the tact of a bailiff. The three Munros across the loch — Ben Vane , Beinn Dhubh and Ben Vorlich — had vanished up to their shoulders into lowering cloud, and from our bedroom window the garden looked wilted, subdued and thoroughly demoralised. Rain had been falling for some time, perhaps all night, and everything outside wore that leaden, defeated look that suggests a day not remotely designed for recreational walking.
We exchanged good mornings around the breakfast table and had just begun to get to work on the food when the two walkers Linda had mentioned the previous evening came into the room. We recognised them at once. They were the survivors of the trio we had last seen at the foot of Conic Hill — the men who had taken the easier route round, as they had been keen to point out. At that stage there had been three of them. Now there were only two.
The burly Scot I had spoken to before sat down beside me and grunted by way of greeting.
“And what do you suppose the weather will do today?” asked the lady from Dundee brightly, attempting to launch the morning’s conversation in a civilised direction. The burly Scot pulled a face.
“Och,” he growled, “it’s gonna poss doon!”
There was a silence, brief but complete. I fixed my eyes very firmly on my plate and avoided looking at Colin, because I knew perfectly well that he was on the brink of laughter. The burly Scot’s companion smiled the apologetic smile of a man long accustomed to smoothing the social wake of his friend. And so breakfast continued. The burly Scot — Ronnie, as we later discovered — seasoned his conversation with profanity as if it were black pepper, scattering it liberally and without apparent awareness that some people might not wish to start their day with a running commentary that sounded like a sergeant major arguing with a jukebox. The three photography students smiled with heroic politeness and became deeply interested in their scrambled eggs. Ronnie’s friend — Shugie — continued to sit beside him smiling vaguely, like a genial diplomat sent to reassure foreign powers that no insult had been intended.
Between the oaths and the toast we learned a few things. The third man of their party had abandoned the walk just beyond Conic Hill with a hamstring injury. Ronnie and Shugie were both retired Scots Guardsmen; Ronnie now ran a pub and Shugie had become a police officer. Both had settled in Windsor after leaving the army. Ronnie, it transpired, was doing the walk for charity, while Shugie appeared to have joined him partly for companionship and partly, I suspected, to act as a sort of mobile public relations officer.
When breakfast ended we said goodbye to the photography students, who remained over their coffee with what I fancied was a faint but unmistakable sense of relief. We had been an entertaining disturbance in the calm life of the lodge, but now we were about to tramp back out into the weather, taking Ronnie’s vocabulary and our own medicinal vapours with us.
I left Inversnaid Lodge with genuine reluctance. Our stay had been brief, but I had liked everything about it — its remoteness, the grand yet faintly eccentric interior, the soft candlelit comfort of the place and its air of civilised retreat from the world. It was, without question, the classiest place we stayed in all week.
Unfortunately, sentimentality does not shorten miles, and we still had thirteen of them to cover. The weather was against us.
We dressed in full waterproof battle order beneath the shelter of an outhouse, shouldered our packs, and set off with only moderate enthusiasm down the rhododendron-lined drive and back along the long tarmac road that led once again to the Inversnaid Hotel. There we picked up the sign for the West Highland Way, tightened straps, adjusted hoods, and set off into what became known thereafter as Wet Tuesday.
Wet Tuesday ....
There was no half-measure about the rain. This was not a day for indecision, nor one on which a man might optimistically leave his waterproof trousers rolled up in his rucksack and trust to luck. We had done the sensible thing before leaving the lodge and put on every available layer of weatherproofing, because there was simply no alternative. The rain had settled in with purpose. It was not dramatic or theatrical, not a thunderous downpour designed to impress; it was worse than that. It was steady, remorseless, soaking rain — the sort that seeps, persists, finds weaknesses, and eventually becomes less a weather condition than a governing principle.
At first the patter on my hood was almost soothing, but in time it faded into the general soundtrack of the day: splash, trickle, hiss, gurgle, drip. Water was everywhere and in everything, moving in rivulets, slanting through the air, sliding off leaves, sucking at the path, filling ditches and whispering down stone.
The track continued along the eastern shore of Loch Lomond and for a short while was mercifully level, threading through old pine woods with the loch just beyond the trees. But after about half an hour it broke up again and we were returned without ceremony to the sort of terrain that had ended the previous day — part path, part scramble, and, in this weather, rather more of the latter than one might ideally want before elevenses.
Years of walking have taught me a few things about my strengths and weaknesses on the trail. Put me on a nice, level track and I can plod along all day, dependable as an old saloon car with a slightly smoky exhaust. But inclines are another matter. I am not, by build or by temperament, a natural hill-climber. I am large-framed, intermittently negligent in matters of smoking, and possessed of lungs which, while serviceable, have never suggested Olympic promise. Hills expose this very quickly. This morning consisted of gradients. Upward gradients. Upward gradients with added rocky ledges. My joy knew no bounds.
To make matters more entertaining, the rain had turned the rocks slick and the path beneath our boots increasingly spongy and unstable. Progress became slow — or rather, I became slow. Colin, who had the unfair advantage of being both fitter uphill and less dramatically offended by the whole business, would move on ahead and then wait with saintly patience while I hauled myself after him, muttering and blowing like a traction engine with bronchitis.
As I laboured along, two thoughts occurred to me with unusual clarity:
I needed to improve my hill climbing.
I needed to learn how to scramble properly.
The first was reasonably straightforward in theory; there were hills within driving distance of Birmingham. The second was trickier. How exactly was one to replicate this sort of terrain at home? I could perhaps scatter random obstacles over the stairs and insist on clambering over them every time I needed the loo. Or rearrange the furniture so that reaching the fridge involved negotiating a series of rocky protrusions and unstable ledges. But I lived with other people, and the dog was no longer young. There was also the garden.
“Sue,” I imagined myself saying, “I’ve decided to build a rockery. A very large rockery. With mud, a waterfall, and some feral goats.”
For the time being, however, I simply pressed on, trying to console myself with the thought that one day I would look back on this moment and laugh.
I never have.
The ground fell away sharply in places toward the loch, and although most of the walk presented no genuine danger beyond discomfort and indignity, this particular stretch was the only point in the whole week where I felt that a slip could have very unpleasant consequences. A misjudged step on the greasy rock might have ended in a wild and deeply inconvenient swan dive into Loch Lomond.
The Portuguese scouts reappeared at intervals, chain-smoking and chattering loudly through the rain. It was impossible to tell whether they were quarrelling, discussing knot techniques, or simply expressing ordinary conversation at Iberian volume. Their energy levels remained baffling. For a while we played a sort of cat-and-mouse game with them, each party overtaking the other in turn, until eventually they drew ahead and vanished for good into the weather.
At the top of one craggy rise we stopped to let a couple of men pass, and behind them came a sodden blue figure out of the mist. It was our lone hiker.
“Oh, hello!” she said brightly from somewhere deep inside her hood. “A fine day for it!”
She joined us for a while and told us she had spent a fairly decent night at the Inversnaid Bunkhouse, though she was having to sleep with her feet elevated on a fortress of pillows to stop them throbbing. Her camera batteries, meanwhile, had died. The two men ahead of her were some Germans she had fallen in with for part of the route. She also mentioned that she had spent much of the previous day walking with a man who was doing the whole route camping out in a bivvy.
I looked up at the dripping trees and the iron-grey rain and felt a fresh wave of gratitude toward Inversnaid Lodge and its dry sheets, casserole and cats. Colin gallantly offered her some spare batteries from his rucksack and said he’d hand them over at the next stop. The next stop came almost immediately when I had to pause yet again to retie a shoelace, an operation those boots required with suspicious regularity. While I wrestled with the lace, Colin rummaged in his pack and triumphantly produced the batteries.
“Here you go,” he said cheerfully.
But she had gone. Vanished. Disappeared into the rain like some kind of waterproof apparition.
“She’s in a tearing hurry,” he observed.
Leaving Lomond ....
We struggled on through the morning — over rocks, around rocks, up roots, down slick ledges, under dripping branches — while the rain hissed softly and unendingly about us. The loch, which the day before had glowed almost Mediterranean blue in the sunshine, had now changed character completely. Under the leaden sky it looked like an immense sheet of worked slate, hard and cold and uninviting. Not a single boat was out on it. Even the enthusiastic owners of jet-skis had evidently decided that enough was enough.
Our guidebook had mentioned the feral goats that lived toward the northern end of the loch and had promised, with some relish, that even if we did not see them we would smell them. This turned out to be true in a way that almost defied biology. I stopped to photograph a waterfall tumbling enthusiastically down a rock face into the loch and became aware, as I composed the shot, of a foul stench so powerful that it seemed to settle directly onto the back of the tongue. The nearest comparison I could think of was the primate house at Whipsnade on a very hot day, though even that seemed restrained by comparison.
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The lair of the stinky goats |
Eventually, after an unconscionably long spell of picking our way along the broken lakeshore, the end of the difficult section began at last to show itself. Loch Lomond narrowed, the wooded banks drew together, and the trail finally escaped the rocky hem of the shoreline and broke out toward more open country, pointing us into Glen Falloch. Before we left the loch for good, we came upon one last deserted beach and stopped for water.
I had a duty to perform.
A few weeks earlier, while on holiday in Cornwall, I had picked up a smooth black pebble from the harbour at St. Michael's Mount. and brought it all the way back to Birmingham, and then all the way north to Scotland, with the express intention of throwing it into Loch Lomond. Why? I do not honestly know. It was, I suppose, one of those private little acts of nonsense that seem perfectly rational while you are on holiday. There was something pleasing in the idea of taking a stone washed for centuries by the Atlantic in the far southwest and depositing it four hundred miles away in a Highland loch, there to confuse future geologists or, at the very least, to satisfy some obscure personal whim. The moment had come. In order to retrieve it I had to haul my waterproof trousers down to my knees and burrow into the depths of a trouser pocket. I drew the pebble out and held it up for one final inspection. Then, for reasons I cannot now justify but do not remotely regret, I kissed the pebble. Colin kissed the pebble too. With a cry of “Good luck!” I hurled it into the loch. It landed with a small, very final phish.
“There it goes, then,” I murmured.
At which point a noise behind us made us both turn. We had not, in fact, been alone. A studious-looking young man was sitting on a log with a water flask in hand, staring at us with the uncertain expression of someone who has just witnessed a ritual from a religion he does not recognise. I hoisted my waterproof trousers back up.
“Alright?” I offered cheerfully as we walked past.
“Uh-huh,” he replied guardedly.
Three's company ....
We climbed a rise and turned for one last look at Loch Lomond. It had, at times, been a taxing companion over the previous two days, but I knew I would miss it all the same. There is something deeply calming about walking beside a large body of water, even one that occasionally tries to kill you by means of path erosion. Of course, for the rest of the day we would still be near a great deal of water, but most of it would now be arriving vertically from above, which is a much less companionable arrangement.
Leaving the loch behind, we followed the River Falloch and passed a bothy full of students who appeared to have spent the night there. They were washing pans in a nearby stream and seemed entirely unbothered by the weather, laughing and chatting in a riot of bright waterproofs. Their mood was so defiantly cheerful that it was both uplifting and mildly irritating.
At the next rise we caught up with our lone hiker again. She was peering anxiously at her camera in the hope of coaxing it back to life, so Colin seized the opportunity to hand over the batteries he had earlier failed to deliver. We fell into step together. When we said we were heading for Crianlarich she asked if we minded her joining us for the day. We did not mind in the slightest. On a day like this, company was no bad thing. She introduced herself properly as Kath.
Later we stopped for coffee in the shell of a derelict building, sheltering on the lee side of an old wall while Glen Falloch stretched away before us, its steep sides blurred by drizzle and its countless streams running white down the slopes to join the swollen Falloch below. It was while we sat there drinking coffee and looking out over the sodden valley that we began the usual process of holiday profiling and learned, to our considerable interest, that Kath was a television producer. She was Glaswegian, between contracts, and had opted to walk the route alone because none of her friends had been either free enough or adventurous enough to join her. At one point she handed me a route map, which I studied with what I imagined was an air of useful competence.
“According to this,” I announced, “we should be near the ruins of an old croft.”
Kath gestured dryly to the wall we were leaning against.
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The path washed away |
Then, after a pause:
“You’d be a detective, then?”
I have to admit that the middle portion of this day has blurred in my memory into one long green, wet, waterlogged passage of existence. We followed an old drover’s road running north up Glen Falloch, the river always somewhere below us, boiling and foaming along the valley floor. Everything was wet. The hillsides were streaming, the path was slick, the air itself seemed diluted. It was a world ruled by water in all its forms — dripping, running, splashing, sluicing, thundering — and only creatures with webbed feet or gills could really have been expected to find it romantic.
In clear weather, no doubt, this would have been a handsome stretch of country, but under the conditions we had it all became rather anonymous. Had it not been for the river roaring below, I might have believed myself anywhere vaguely rural with a surplus of rain — a very scenic service road on the A45, perhaps. It was, in short, a bit of a plod.
My clothing gradually began to surrender to the weather. I became damp from above and wet from below and calculated, with grim amusement, that the two advancing tide marks — one descending from hood level, the other rising from my boots — would probably meet triumphantly somewhere around my midriff by mid-afternoon. My boots, having taken on water not long after leaving Inversnaid thanks to my own poor decision-making in footwear and the failure to use gaiters, were squelching discontentedly with every step. Strangely, my blisters almost disappeared during this phase of total saturation. It was one of the few unexpected benefits of walking about in boots full of cold water. Trench foot might have been the less cheerful alternative, but fortunately I escaped that honour.
To pass the time, Kath began devising quizzes.
Favourite films.
Famous quotes.
In what year did…
Who invented…
It helped.
Crianlarich ....
We broke our march at a camping centre in Inverarnan and took refuge in the laundry room, where we ate a damp packed lunch while I filmed the rain lashing the yard outside. I also used the opportunity to change some of my base layers in a toilet cubicle, an experience roughly comparable to wrestling an octopus in a phone box. While we sat there delaying the inevitable, two young German lads came in wearing shorts and T-shirts so plastered to their bodies that they looked shrink-wrapped. Their expressions suggested that they felt personally insulted by the weather. As they stood dripping in stunned disbelief, another pair of young men sprinted across the lawn outside carrying a fully erected tent between them. I briefly wondered whether there might be a third person still inside.
Eventually lunch had to end. There is, after all, only so long one can spend pretending a cheese sandwich is a strategic delay rather than a cheese sandwich. So we shouldered our packs and trudged back out, passing the rear of the main building where a chef in greasy checked trousers leaned against the wall having a cigarette and smirked at us with the air of a man who knew exactly what we were going back into and was glad it was not him.
Beyond Inverarnan the route returned us to the same dripping valley, the same washed-out greens, the same continuous sound of white water. We met two bedraggled women coming the other way who warned us that the path a few miles ahead had been completely washed away by storm runoff and advised us to detour up the wooded hillside, cross near a storm culvert, and slither back down the far side. Even before we reached it, it sounded deeply joyless. We walked on.
Kath invented more quizzes.
Name all the Teletubbies.
Who invented the light bulb?
Who has the wettest pants?
The washed-out section proved to be exactly as advertised: a snarling torrent had gouged a chunk clean out of the path and was rushing down toward the already furious Falloch in a mass of foam and noise. We climbed the wooded bank, clambered over a barbed-wire fence, and slid down the far side with as little elegance as possible. The river by this stage had risen noticeably. In places we were only a few feet from its edge, and the current raced along with such force that we found ourselves speculating, with grim fascination, on how long anyone might survive if they fell in.
Seconds, probably.
We plodded on. Colin’s trusty guidebook had by now been reduced by the weather to a sodden block of papier-mâché, so we could no longer read about our surroundings even if we had been able to see them properly. Fortunately Kath still had a map, and in any case the West Highland Way remained clearly signed. At last we climbed away from the river and emerged quite suddenly onto a metalled road. Kath pointed.
“Look — a cow. There’s a photo opportunity, Mark.”
There was indeed a dun-coloured beast standing squarely in our way.
“That’s one well-muscled cow,” observed Colin.
“Och, it’s just a cow,” said Kath.
“Do cows usually have that tufty thing down there?” I asked.
It was a bull, of course.
Why he was there, none of us knew. He stood in the road chewing thoughtfully and staring out across the valley toward the misty hills with the air of a man whose plans for the day had been completely ruined by rotten weather. He appeared not to notice us at all. Colin edged behind him first.
“If the bugger so much as twitches,” he said, “I’ll be up that embankment in seconds.”
I followed, with Kath using me as a sort of human shield. We needn’t have worried.The bull obviously had loftier matters to consider.
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The halfway point on Wet Tuesday |
“You’ll get E. coli,” muttered Colin darkly.
Somewhere along this endless, sodden track we came to a kissing gate that marked the halfway point of the West Highland Way. This was, in theory, a landmark moment. Kath took a photograph of Colin and me clinging to one another like shipwreck survivors while smiling gamely through the rain in the finest traditions of British endurance. I cannot clearly remember the precise moment at which we finally reached Crianlarich. I think it may have involved a steep road descending through conifers, by which point I had become curious as to whether skin, when sufficiently saturated, might simply begin to detach of its own accord. But eventually the little town appeared before us — or perhaps, more accurately, we drifted ghostlike into it. We headed first for the place we thought we were all staying — the hotel where Kath had managed to get a room and which we mistakenly believed was ours too. Once again, however, we had got the venue wrong. We left Kath to check in while we followed directions from a man lounging at the bar, who assured us that our B&B was next door. For “next door,” read “somewhere near the edge of the village.” Naturally, when we got there it was also the wrong place.
By this point I was beginning to experience a complete failure of humour. Rain on this scale is funny only up to a certain point, and we had passed that point several hours earlier. In the end I rang our B&B and insisted, with what I felt was admirable restraint, that they come and collect us. To their credit they agreed, though only if we first walked back into Crianlarich itself, which rather defeated the emotional purpose. So back we sloshed. The lady arrived in her car and looked distinctly nervous as two soaked strangers emerged from the gloom and got in, steaming gently and saying very little.
A sore subject ....
There was no food to be had at the B&B, nor were there any restaurants anywhere near our end of Crianlarich, so after showering, changing, and leaving our soaked gear to drip in a manner that clearly did not delight our landlady, we took a taxi back to Kath’s hotel for dinner. There I succumbed to the inevitable tourist impulse and ordered haggis, neeps and tatties, which turned out to be excellent. Our waitress was from Glasgow, working there because her uncle owned the place, training to be an aromatherapist, and very sweet, though perhaps not overburdened by mental sharpness. She chatted away to Kath in a rapid stream of Glaswegian in which I caught perhaps one word in three. It was clear that I needed a newer, more powerful Babelfish.
On the taxi ride back to our room I discovered that the day’s prolonged saturation had given me a generous chafe rash on the insides of my thighs, almost certainly caused by the wet seams of my trousers rubbing back and forth for mile after miserable mile. It hurt rather a lot. Back at the B&B I therefore carried out emergency surgery involving Sudocrem, plasters, and enough Micropore tape to suggest either an athletic injury or low-budget hostage situation.
Before bed we decided that a small nightcap might improve matters, and I volunteered to fetch it. I asked for a particular single malt the man of the house had recommended earlier. The landlady produced two single measures and charged me eight pounds in total. I paid without flinching, which goes to show how tired I was.
Climbing the stairs afterwards, with legs aching raw and my lower half strapped together like a professional wrestler’s, was surprisingly difficult. My body had reached the end of negotiations and now wanted only one thing. Sleep. At last I slid gratefully into bed. Cool, crisp sheets.
And best of all — I was dry again.
See Route on ......
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