| The West Highland Way | |
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Sing-alonga-Rannoch ....
The first thing I did on waking was check the weather. Clear blue sky. I sent up a small, heartfelt prayer of thanks to whichever weather gods happened to be on duty. Rannoch Moor and the Devil’s Staircase were, by reputation, the two most exposed sections of the West Highland Way, and the thought of tackling them in the sort of conditions we had enjoyed on Wet Tuesday was not calculated to lift the spirits. To find the world washed clean, bright and dry instead felt like a personal concession from Heaven.
The Two Ronnies were already well into breakfast by the time we came downstairs. Ronnie was testing the young German waiter’s command of English — and, I rather suspected, his will to live — by repeatedly asking for “extra toost” and “broon soss” in a tone suggesting that if either failed to materialise, international relations might suffer. Shugie sat beside him smiling gently at the wallpaper, as though the flock motif held profound and private wisdom.
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The River Ba |
For some inexplicable reason I found myself humming Elvis Presley’s Wooden Heart while sitting outside to put on my gaiters. I didn’t need them — the forecast promised a fine, dry day — but I had rather taken to them. To my mind they added a certain dash, a suggestion of mountain competence perhaps a little in excess of the facts. As I bent awkwardly over the Velcro fastenings, trying not to topple sideways, a little troop of chaffinches hopped about nearby, perhaps admiring the rakish effect, until they were scattered by an advance party of midges arriving to sample some freshly washed hiker.
I recorded another solemn chapter in the video diary and attempted to say things of interest while panning across the Inveroran Inn and out toward the waiting moor. I suspect I largely failed, because I remember talking at disproportionate length about chaffinches.
Then the three of us set off on what would prove to be a long, long day.
At first the path climbed gently through conifer woods, a green dim world of resin and shade. This was midge country, and every time we paused for water or to adjust a strap or simply to catch our breath, little black squadrons materialised out of nowhere with the uncanny efficiency of a standing army. I applied Jungle Formula, which seemed effective enough, although I am told the finest midge repellent known to man is Avon’s Skin So Soft, a product whose success I have never had the chance to verify. It may well work brilliantly, but I doubt it could render one’s lips numb in quite the same thrilling manner as Jungle Formula.
[NOTE: Since this journal was written I have used Skin so Soft for many years and I can absolutely vouch for its effectiveness. Also, I now have the silken skin of a fair maiden]
Alongside the midges we were also plagued by a particular kind of fly that seemed to specialise in finding the most inconvenient possible places to enter the human body: ears, nostrils, hairlines and all the other little nooks and crannies one rarely thinks of until they become contested territory. They were tough little swine too. I repeatedly thought I had crushed them between thumb and finger, only to find them staggering free, indignant and barely inconvenienced, with a sort of offended determination to resume operations around my neck.
Kath’s latest quiz involved singing lines from songs, which turned out to be more difficult than expected because our collective musical tastes were so eclectic that it was surprisingly hard to wrong-foot one another. By the time we had descended to obscure early Genesis tracks from the 1970s, we conceded defeat and let the game die quietly. By then, however, we had left the forest and its biting hordes behind and were stepping out at last onto the approaches to Rannoch Moor.
Moor haste, less speed ....
The trail here followed General Wade's military road, that great eighteenth-century exercise in order and empire, built to move troops efficiently across this unruly country and keep the Jacobites from getting above themselves. It stretched for miles across the vast emptiness of Rannoch Moor, with the long flanks of Creag an Fhithich and Leacann nam Braonanon rising to the east while the open moor rolled away westward into haze and distance. Far ahead, white and arresting against the sky, stood the granite pyramid of Buachaille Etive Mor beyond which the Kings House Hotel waited with the promise of lunch.
Rannoch Moor, like Mam Carraigh the evening before, had chosen to show us its best face. Under a bright sun the moor became a great patchwork of russet, green and brown, its contours softened by thick carpets of moss and heather that stretched away into a distance so broad and hazy that the eye could never quite decide where it ended. To our left the mountains rose sharply, sheep somehow clinging to their impossible angles, while far below the River Etive glimmered like a strip of quicksilver laid across the valley floor.
There were plenty of people about on this section, more than we had seen elsewhere, which made sense as it was close enough to Glasgow for day walkers. Yet the moor was so open, so expansive, that it never felt crowded. Everyone was instantly dwarfed by the landscape. Here and there we passed the remains of crofts or old cattle enclosures, low tumbled walls and roofless shells sunk into the earth. It was impossible to say at a glance how old they were, but one could not look at them without thinking that anyone who had tried to make a living here had signed up with a stern and joyless landlord.
We stopped for a short break at the lovely old arch of Ba Bridge, where the River Ba — which seems less a river with a proper beginning and end than a piece of water wandering laterally across the moor according to some private logic of its own — slips under the military road. It was one of those spots that seemed to have been put there specifically for photographs, and so photographs were duly taken.
The path rose and fell gently after that, and at the crest of one rise we saw the Two Ronnies sitting by the track a few hundred yards ahead, smoking and, no doubt, gathering strength for another barrage of parade-ground abuse. This prospect filled us with such joy that someone — and I rather think it may have been me — suggested we jog past them and keep going until we were over the next rise and out of sight. Extraordinarily, the others agreed. So off we went. Water bottles sloshing, packs bouncing, we broke into a brisk and deeply undignified trot across Rannoch Moor. Kath gave it a valiant three seconds before realising, quite correctly, that this was a spectacularly stupid idea. Colin and I lumbered on, passing Ronnie and Shugie, who looked up in what I can only describe as startled puzzlement. I had the vague impression of Ronnie shouting something after us, but by then the blood was pounding in my ears and any finer shades of meaning were lost. Once we were safely over the next rise and out of sight, we stopped dead. Colin recovered his breath almost at once, as though it had been waiting politely at his feet to be picked up again. Mine had fled somewhere into the heather and took a good while to retrieve.
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A bald guy on a lump of stone |
I am not built for it.
The rest of the morning passed more peacefully. We stopped on the shoulder of a nameless hill, marked by a neat cairn against the skyline, and ate lunch perched on rocks while looking across to the mountains. Little cream-coloured dots moved high on their slopes — sheep grazing astonishingly far up the hillsides, where the grass seemed scarcely substantial enough to justify the effort.
“How do the farmers get the sheep down from up there?” I wondered aloud.
Colin took a bite of apple. “High-velocity rifle with telescopic sights,” he suggested.
After lunch I made a brief solo excursion across the moor to a rock that stood artistically against the sky and seemed to demand being climbed. Walking on Rannoch Moor, off the path, is like crossing a thick layer of wet wool slung over a lukewarm bog. The ground gives and sighs beneath you, creaks in strange ways, and requires a method of progress based largely on hopeful leaps from tuft to tuft. Eventually I reached the rock and clambered onto it with minimal grace. I insisted on having my photograph taken there, walking pole in hand, looking — I hoped — rugged, windswept and contemplative. In fact I look rather like a bald man trying not to fall off a lump of stone.
A sombre scene ....
We crossed over the nameless hill and were rewarded with a magnificent unfolding view down the Pass of Glencoe: Buachaille Etive Mòr towering hugely to the west, and on the valley floor below, a tiny white fleck which was the Kings House Hotel, sitting in the green hollow like lint in a belly button. The A82 ran along the glen, and even from our height we could see that something odd was happening on the road. Nothing was moving. In such a place, so open and thinly inhabited, the sight of a traffic jam felt strangely out of place.
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Blackrock Cottage |
“I think there’s been a smash,” I said.
It took us some time to descend to the roadside, long enough for the helicopter to leave without landing, which I thought ominous, and long enough also to stop for the obligatory photographs at the wonderfully picturesque Blackrock Cottage — a whitewashed little house at the foot of the Glencoe ski slope with Buachaille Etive Mòr rising behind it so theatrically that it practically begged to be photographed.
I lingered there for some video footage, so by the time I reached the road Colin and Kath were already ahead. It was clear then that a serious accident had taken place. A policeman was directing traffic around a coned-off area; a minibus sat nose-first in a ditch, and pieces of a motorcycle were scattered across the road. The men dealing with it all — police, recovery crew, passers-by — moved about with that subdued, oddly gentle efficiency that always follows violent events. When I caught up with Colin and Kath they had already heard the details from another walker. A young German motorcyclist, touring the Highlands with friends, had turned right toward the ski centre straight into the path of an oncoming minibus. The bus had struck him broadside at sixty miles an hour. He had been killed instantly. Miraculously no one in the minibus had been seriously injured. We later learned that some walkers had arrived moments after the crash and had ended up helping care for the dead man’s companions. It cast a shadow over us all. Surrounded by such immense and peaceful beauty, it felt almost impossible to absorb the fact that someone had died there, ten minutes’ walk from Glencoe, on an ordinary afternoon. Such news seemed to belong to another sort of landscape altogether — ring roads, slip roads, service stations and city suburbs — not here, where the mountains shouldered the sky and the light moved quietly across the grass.
We approached the Kings House Hotel in a thoughtful silence.
At the Kinghouse ....
Kath Kath said she had fond memories of the place. She never did properly explain them, though they appeared to involve a card game, a lot of lager and what she repeatedly described, with a private smile, as “a wild night.” The inn had a reputation as a proper climbers’ pub, a place where bearded men in woollen jumpers and over-engineered trousers blew the froth off pints of real ale and swapped stories about avalanches, bivouacs and near-death experiences on winter ridges. In reality, when we walked into the bar there was not a mountaineer to be seen. There were plenty of pictures of mountaineers, and various bits of climbing paraphernalia on the walls which presumably belonged to them, but the actual clientele consisted largely of walkers in varying states of collapse, including the Two Ronnies, who had somehow overtaken us again and were sitting over bowls of soup in a surprisingly subdued mood. We ordered soup and pints and sat beside a man who looked particularly crestfallen. He told us he had slipped crossing a stream on Wet Tuesday, hurt his back badly, and had struggled on as far as the Kings House before finally conceding that his walk was over. We commiserated, and privately shuddered. To get this far and then have to stop with only twenty miles to go seemed almost cruel.
“It’s the thought of making that finish line that keeps people like Mr Blister going,” said Colin.
I looked at him. “Mr Blister?”
“You know — the young bloke we keep overtaking. The one with the mate in combat gear who keeps sodding off and leaving him.”
I nodded. And I realised then that even if my feet became nothing more than two damp sacks of skin and complaint, I would still keep going. It had become a matter of principle.
[Future walks, alas, would later prove this statement optimistic.]
The Two Ronnies drifted outside after lunch looking for somewhere to sit. Ronnie was limping noticeably, which perhaps explained his rare quietness. We did not linger too long ourselves. There were still miles to go and a climb ahead, so before long we were back on the military road, striding up the glen beyond the inn. Kath, having done the Devil’s Staircase before, held an obvious advantage over the rest of us and at one point indicated a long ragged path snaking up the flank of a distant mountain.
“That’s the Devil’s Staircase right there,” she said confidently.
It seemed odd, then, when our path veered off and headed somewhere else entirely, rising only gently and then wandering away down the glen.
“Maybe it loops back on itself,” she suggested, though one could hear the first hint of doubt entering her voice.
“Are we actually on the staircase now?” I asked, rather dubiously. It looked less like a devil’s staircase than a tasteful access ramp for pushchairs.
“Oh aye,” she nodded. “I told you it wasn’t as bad as people make out.”
At once I relaxed. Wonderful. This was going to be easy. A doddle. Father chose that moment to ring.
“Hi Dad. Yeah, we’re fine. Yep, the views are ace. No, we’re not pushing ourselves too hard. In fact we’re about a third of the way up the Devil’s Staircase right now and we all feel fit as fiddles. Taking it nice and easy.”
Soon after that, however, the path began to lose height again until we found ourselves, rather anticlimactically, back alongside the road on the valley floor. I looked behind us. The path Kath had identified was now little more than a memory in the hazy distance, which made it an unlikely candidate for any staircase, diabolical or otherwise. For a moment I wondered whether we were heading in entirely the wrong direction and might be condemned to spend the rest of the afternoon retracing our steps. But a good half-mile behind us, unmistakable even at that distance, came the little figures of Ronnie and Shugie. It seemed unlikely that the Two Ronnies would be blindly following us to doom, so this had to be right. The mystery was resolved about an hour later when we came upon a lay-by with several cars parked in it. Kath slowed.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “I think that’s the start of the Devil’s Staircase. I remember now because we cheated and drove to that lay-by last time and missed this bit out. Sorry. It was bad weather.”
I knew it had been too easy.
The Devils Staircase ....
All told, the Devil’s Staircase was not nearly as fearsome as its name suggests. It began without fanfare just beyond the lay-by and immediately struck uphill in a dignified, steady manner up the flank of Stob Mhic Mhartuin. The name probably says more about the labour General Wade’s men expended building it than about any particular terror for the modern walker. Yes, it was steep in places, and yes, it was a sustained pull, but it zig-zagged obligingly across the mountain and any fit person used to hill walking would have found it entirely manageable. Unfortunately, that fit person was not me. After about three hundred feet we stopped for a drink, at which point the Two Ronnies caught up. No parade-ground abuse this time. Just a few remarks about the climb, the view, the weather, and then off they went again, Shugie suddenly chatty while Ronnie climbed in grim, efficient silence. We set off once more, but before long I waved Kath and Colin ahead. I may have mentioned before that hill climbing is a weak point. It was not that I could not do it; merely that I had to stop every fifty yards or so to haul in air and wait for the lactic acid to stop redecorating my thighs. Fortunately the views became better and better the higher one climbed, which gave me a ready excuse to stop for photographs at nearly every bend. Before long the others were out of sight and I was ascending alone, fitfully and noisily, with only the wind and the mountains for company.
Still, I got there in the end — over two thousand feet above the valley, the highest point of our whole week and twice the height of Conic Hill. At the summit stood an untidy pile of stones, an untidy Kath and an untidy Colin. The Two Ronnies were already some way down the far side, holding a map and pointing at things in a generalised manner. Kath was looking for a missing hat. Behind us the route we had followed all afternoon lay unfurled across a landscape of astonishing scale.
Long ago, an ice flow a mile thick had come barging through here, gouging and grinding at the mountains until it carved out the broad U-shaped valley below. One peak in particular fascinated me because it appeared to be no more than half a mountain, the missing half presumably scattered in boulder form somewhere across lowland Scotland and northern England. Scarred though they were, the mountains had outlasted the ice and still stood in long, severe ranks stretching north toward the Great Glen , the geological fault line that is, in a sense, their birthplace..
I was filming again when Colin came over, shouting above the wind.
“Ronnie says that big peak over there is Ben Nevis.”
I followed his directions and, sure enough, far in the distance across the Mamores, a huge grey mass loomed above the skyline — a vast shoulder of rock crouched above its neighbours like some great animal poised to spring.
“Yeah, I recognise the shape,” I said in a tone of great authority, despite the fact that Ben Nevis had played almost no role in my life up to this point and I doubt I could have identified it from a line-up of suspiciously similar hills. Still, I zoomed in and recorded myself solemnly declaring that I was filming Ben Nevis, the end of our journey, just twenty miles away.
“Where’s my ha-a-a-t?” wailed Kath, somewhere behind me, as I faded the video to black.
The never-ending road to Kinlochleven....
This was the last leg of the day, and the weather remained gloriously fine. The military road descended the northern flank of Stob Mhic Mhartuin and carried us across the final stretch of moor. Far below to the west the Blackwater Reservoir lay like some hazy blue dream, and around us the land felt hushed and expectant, almost empty of human interference save for a line of telegraph poles marching bravely over the heath toward Kinlochleven where lay our beds for the night. To the east our views were blocked for a while by the looming bulk of Odhar Mhòr, and we walked in its shadow until Colin diverted away from the path to lob his own “pebble from a far-off place” onto the moor — a stone from the front garden of our parents’ house in Birmingham. Now and forever, somewhere on Rannoch Moor, there is a tiny patch forever claimed by Meriden Drive.
The Two Ronnies had got well ahead and could be seen as tiny figures moving down toward Kinlochleven. Distance, as ever on this walk, was deceptive, and we convinced ourselves that the town was no more than two or three miles away. It was late afternoon by now; our feet had begun aching in earnest again, and because the way ahead was all downhill it was using muscles I scarcely recognised as members of the family. We emerged from the mountain’s shadow into sunshine and finally saw the lower wooded slopes leading to Kinlochleven. There was a hint of water below — some river or burn — and a little cluster of buildings that could only be the town.
It looked tantalisingly close.
This, of course, was the West Highland Way Effect at work.
What seemed like a comfortable final stroll became instead one of those drawn-out endings in which the path appears determined not to finish. It jogged and wobbled along the edge of the hills on broken rocky ground, our feet protesting at every step, each small rise seeming certain to reveal the final descent only to deliver yet another little hump and another stretch of taunting track. Presently we saw a lone figure ahead, moving with the stiff, hobbling gait of a man well beyond the point of comedy. It was Mr Blister. We caught him quickly.
“Still struggling on then? Bloody hell, you’re either brave or foolish,” said Colin.
Mr Blister smiled wearily. “Aye. If you’ve any room in your rucksack, I’d take it right now.”
“Where’s your pal?” asked Kath, meaning the rather alarming companion in combat trousers.
“Och, he’s gone ahead. It’s fine. I told him to.”
This, I thought, was getting ridiculous.
“What — he’s left you up here in that state?” I said. “Some pal.”
“No, no, it’s fine. I’ll get down to the town alright.”
Kath, wanting to cheer him, said brightly, “Well, it’s really not far now. Only about a mile.”
His tired face lit at once. “Really? Oh, I can do that, nay bother.”
Reluctantly we left him behind. He was the last person on that lonely upper track and the day was already tipping toward evening. We felt a little guilty walking on, though we genuinely believed there was only a mile or so left and that he would be down before dark. We watched him dwindling against the skyline until another bend took him from view.
Soon after that the sudden snarl of a motorbike broke the stillness and an off-road machine came bouncing up the trail toward us ridden by a middle-aged man on a bizarre saddleless contraption with huge knobbly tyres. He nodded once and went by. Ten minutes later he came back down, drew up beside us and shouted over the engine noise:
“That yer friend back there?”
We assumed he meant Mr Blister.
“Well… sort of,” said Colin, unwilling to accept formal responsibility for a man we had essentially abandoned on a mountainside.
The biker nodded. “He says he’s okay, and, y’know, he will be all right soon. It’s all downhill in a wee while. Does this belong to any of you?” He produced a hat. Colin looked at it. “Yeah. It’s mine. Thanks.”
He took it with a sidelong glance at me. I had ribbed him all week about leaving things behind, but by then I felt the joke might have worn a bit thin, so I magnanimously held my tongue. The biker throttled away with extraordinary skill and we later discovered that these machines were very popular in Kinlochleven, for reasons which soon became obvious.
At length, the descent itself arrived — abrupt and almost absurdly steep. One moment we were wandering across a sort of lunar scatter of rock and boulder, the next the path simply tipped downward and sent us lurching into the forest in exaggerated crane-like strides. It felt rather like the first plunge of a roller coaster. Down we went. Hairpins through the pines,
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Climbing down to Kinlochleven |
It was going the wrong way.
Kath stepped into the road and brought it to a halt. For one mad moment I thought she was about to hijack the driver at walking-pole point.
Instead she said, “Sorry to bother you, but there’s a poor man up there on the moor and he’s really, really struggling with blisters.”
The farmer behind the wheel gave a slow smile that did not quite involve the eyes. “Aye. That happens a lot.”
Kath pressed on. “I was hoping, if you’re going up there, you might perhaps bring him down? He’s in a lot of pain.”
The farmer remained perfectly expressionless. “Okay,” he said.
Relieved, Kath thanked him warmly as he drove off. The farmer’s collie barked enthusiastically from the passenger seat, but Colin and I exchanged a look. We both knew Mr Blister would not be rescued. As the farmer had gently indicated, lame walkers were not his line of business.
Then, suddenly, there it was. Kinlochleven. Unexpected and, to my eye at least, not particularly lovely in the evening light. The great black pipes plunged straight down into a hulking aluminium smelting plant that dominated one side of town like some squat industrial toad. We walked past its dark windows, peering in vain for signs of life, though in fact the plant had been closed for years. Then we passed a rather dubious-looking campsite and entered the high street.
Kinlochleven had an odd look about it, as if every house, shop and public building had sprung up at the same time from the same pile of materials under the direction of a single unimaginative planner. I do not mean to be cruel — I come from Birmingham and am by no means a stranger to ugly industrial architecture or civic despair — but Kinlochleven seemed curiously concentrated in its lack of identity, as though every possible municipal disappointment had been distilled into one valley settlement. We left Kath at the bridge over the River Leven and turned the other way toward our B&B. The high street was full of listless teenagers, many on the same kind of off-road bikes we had just seen on the hill. Looking up at the mountains hemming the town in on every side, it was easy to understand the appeal. Kinlochleven sat in a granite bowl, the peaks looming over it in all directions, their flanks shutting away the outside world completely. Simply put, Kinlochleven’s horizon had been stolen. It depressed me at once, and the sheer oppressive closeness of the mountains did not help. In a fit of weary peevishness I declared that I was not going to eat there at all. I would, I said, get a taxi and go literally anywhere else. To his credit, Colin ignored this rant entirely.
Outside the post office we found Shugie standing patiently while a small midge squadron fed on his face.
“Ronnie’s inside buying Irn-Bru,” he said. “I’m out here getting eaten alive. Where are you staying?”
We told him, but it was not the same place they were booked into. By now the midges had switched their attention to us, and reinforcements were clearly incoming, so we left Shugie to his fate and carried on up the road until we had almost walked out of town altogether. Our B&B took some finding, but a friendly local not only asked if we needed help, he walked us right to the front door. It improved my view of Kinlochleven slightly. The proprietor appeared to be in a tremendous hurry. He booked us in, rattled through breakfast options without a single tick-box in sight, recommended a special, and disappeared so quickly that he left the impression we might be the only people in the house. We had, it seemed, an entire wing to ourselves with its own entrance. The room, in keeping with the week’s strange pattern, was even bigger than the one before: three large single beds and a bathroom spacious enough to host a moderate social gathering.
Outside the window ran an iron bridge carrying the road out of town, and beyond it one of the surrounding mountains rose up, forested on this side. About halfway up, a plume of smoke rose lazily through the trees from a visible patch of orange flame. Whether it was controlled burning, or wanton arson I could not say, but the fire smouldered with the leisurely grace of something in no hurry at all.
As I stood there looking out, I spotted Ronnie and Shugie marching over the bridge, footsore and dishevelled, heading out of Kinlochleven into the deepening evening, which made me wonder where on earth their accommodation was. I waved vigorously, but they were too engrossed in animated conversation to notice. Ronnie’s arms wheeled around, Shugie smiled and nodded, and then they disappeared from view. It was the last I ever saw of them. And I never did get Ronnie’s email address.
Kath phoned a short while later. She had booked into the Tailrace Inn then tried to find our place and become lost in the town’s anonymous side streets. I went out to look for her and found her at the far end of a little dead-end row of houses, stomping about with an expression so concentrated it was almost audible. As soon as she saw me she strode over and said, in a voice unexpectedly amplified by the acoustics of the cul-de-sac:
“Well, isn’t Kinlochleven a LOVELY place!”
Curtains twitched.
She had discovered that food was still being served at the Tailrace until nine, and since there was precious little else open at our end of town, we walked back down the high street together. In the short time since we had first arrived Kinlochleven had folded itself up for the night. The motorbikes were gone, the teenagers had vanished, the traffic had thinned, and nearly everything was shut. One seafood bistro, though only eight o’clock, had already locked its doors. A handful of people sat around a little bar inside and, when we peered in hopefully, responded with a series of gestures that conveyed quite clearly that we were to go away. The Tailrace, by contrast, was busy and warm, full of walkers and locals pressed together in cheerful untidiness. I recognised a surprising number of faces and found myself nodding a silent greeting in all directions. At the bar I ended up beside Captain Combat, Mr Blister’s elusive companion. I asked, perhaps a little sharply, why he had left his friend to hobble into town alone. In fairness he gave a reasonable explanation: someone had to get ahead and secure rooms and provisions, and Mr Blister had insisted each day on walking despite repeated pleas from his companions to rest or drop out. Still, it was now eight o’clock and almost dark, and Mr Blister had yet to appear. Captain Combat returned to his group looking thoughtful rather than unconcerned. I noticed that Kath, some time later, had walked over to their table and was obviously giving them her opinions. I’m not sure they totally deserved our emnity but they took it well enough.
The food was acceptable, the pints better, but tiredness had begun to close over us and when a space was cleared for a live band to set up we decided we had no wish to witness it. We left Kath to contemplate an evening of music vibrating through the floorboards beneath her room and walked home along the now silent street. Under the night sky the mountains had become immense flat black shapes propped against a sky sprinkled with thousands of stars. Perhaps it was the beer, perhaps the rest, but I felt a little softer toward Kinlochleven by then. It was never going to become a favourite place, but neither did it deserve quite the vehemence of my earlier reaction.
It was, after all, okay.
We learned later that Mr Blister finally shuffled into Kinlochleven out of the mountain darkness at nine o’clock.
See Route on ......
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