Munros, Midges and Moira

I suppose it’s time to forgive the Jacobite rebels, to make a truce with Robert the Bruce and even throw away notions of another “Rough Wooing”. I have seen beyond the frontier, peered into the realm of those Pictish raiders, those Celtic crusaders. I have seen those lands arm in arm with my Scottish lassie and I am left beguiled and bewitched. The barren beauty of crag and cove, bracken and bog; the Caledonia of old is gone, a culture whisked away from the land with the ancient forests, but her soul lingers. Rides on the mists of the glens and shines with the dancing of peaty burns. This is a stark land, one of fiercely proud people, fiercely bloodthirsty winged pests and fiercely financially astute English B&B owners. This is Scotland my friends. 

Scottish History

This post will come to describe, in a chronological hopscotch, some of the adventures we have had in Scotland over the last few years. However, before we reach those we must understand why Scotland is the way it is today and that means sinking up to our knees in the peat bog of history.

While the now three billion year old sediments of the Western Isles were getting reimagined in a geological glow up where they were half melted, half mushed into swirling shapes and new colours, other areas of Scotland were only just rising to prominence. The closure of the Atlantic Ocean’s predecessor, the Iapetus Ocean, brought the continents of Laurentia and Baltica together alongside the microcontinent Avalonia. This continental embrace, called the ‘Caledonian Orogeny’, happened around 400 million years ago and brought Scotland to England’s shore (a tectonic move still regarded as one of the worst things ever to happen by most Scots). This embrace would last for Scotland and England. These newfound friends would form many of today’s most famous features in their crushing fervour to meld rock to rock. The volcanoes of the Cairngorms have long since been eroded by the abrasion of glaciation but their granite cores, those monolithic chambers of slow cooling magma, those are what remain. The Great Glen, the British Isles’ very own San Andreas fault, sheared a line from coast to coast, scraped out the chtonthic depths of Loch Ness and allowed a traverse through the otherwise achingly steep land. Now, hundreds of millions of years later, the Iapetus suture, that line where the Laurentian Scotland joined the Avalonian England runs remarkably close to the entire Scottish border. A destiny of geology and inter-societal hatred. Beautiful.

Hundreds of millions of years after all this colossal prehistory (as yet unburdened by the human need for note taking) some Italians rocked up in Britain and started happily telling everyone what to do. Improvements to almost every aspect of life across the lands of the Brittonic tribes meant that the Romans had a pretty easy time of it, that was until they reached Scotland (or “Caledonia” as they called it). This was where they met those they described as the ‘Painted Ones’ or the ‘Picti’. It was a general name given to the assorted tattooed tribes of Caledonia who took the Roman invasion as a personal affront. They didn’t want improved agriculture, sanitation or administration. They just wanted those mozzarella guzzling, wine making foreigners back where they came from. A first century Brexit if you will. The Romans tried to take Caledonia for a few hundred years, set up a couple of walls to defend their lands (the northern most wall and northern most extent of Roman Britain was the Antonine wall from the Firth of Clyde to the Firth of Forth). But then, in the 400s they buggered off, legging it from our strange little isle and leaving the Picts to raid from the north and the Saxons to raid from the south. 

In the ninth century, those tattooed hill people joined with the various tattooed coastal people, and formed Alba. A land which, after getting rid of the Kingdom of Strathclyde would become the Kingdom of Scotland. Yes, that’s right, you Glaswegians were actually Brittonic people like the rest of us south of the wall until your ancient culture was torn down by the Scots and Picts. You spoke ‘Cumbric’ and were known as ‘Cumbrians’. You’re basically English.

After this fateful union, England and Scotland went at it for a few hundred years. Scotland fought tooth and nail to keep the English away, restore their independence, resist attack, provoke more attacks by allying with the French and write poems about how awful the English were. In the late 1690s however, the Scottish made a fatal mistake. They tried to get in on the very fashionable business of colonising places and people. They attempted to set up New Caledonia i.e. new Scotland in the Darien Gap (a densely forested part of the Central American isthmus above Colombia that remains impassable to this day). Nevertheless, the Scottish thought this hot, humid, rainforest-covered stretch of land might be the perfect place for a whole load of famously photosensitive people from a famously cold place to go. On this expedition, led by the Company of Scotland (a Scottish equivalent to the English East India Company), 80% of the participants died within a year. It turns out neither the Spanish nor the abundantly venomous and/or disease carrying animal population were keen on boat loads of gingers pulling up to their doorstep. So the Scottish had to abandon the enterprise.

The only problem was 20% of all the money in Scotland had gone into the scheme and its failure left Scotland’s most influential nobles, and therefore the country, absolutely skint. With Scotland feeling politically rocky after James II had been deposed by an invading Dutch Bloke and his wife Mary, Scotland was weak and England was ready. Mary’s sister Anne took over and already had Wales incorporated as part of England, Ireland was subordinate but Scotland had remained stubbornly independent. However, in 1707 with the Treaty of Union, Anne created the Kingdom of Great Britain, a united(ish) island. 

Fifty years of revolts, French-backed invasion attempts and general sword-waving distaste in the name of Jacobitism followed but it ended eventually and since then Scotland has been quiet. It has licked its wounds, flown its flags and projected its voices, but never again raised its hand again against Westminster or the crown. 

Mountains

Beinn a’ Chrùlaiste 

Your guess is as good as mine for the pronunciation of this one. We arrived the Corbett’s base on one of those winter mornings of grey uncertainty and wrapped ourselves up. Emma and Christina donned layers of insulated gear made in a careful anticipation for a snowy winter somewhere or another, whereas I donned a novelty hat and an equally daring fleece. The climb was easy enough, up the long continuous flank of the mountain; a wedge of rock and grass whose dull ochre tones slowly began to blaze in windows of reclined sunlight, burning through gaps in the murk. Bright red mosses nestled in peaty hollows where obsidian waters seemed calm but caustic amongst the lushness of the slope. Our constant companion for the walk was the Buachaille Etive Mòr a conical Goliath hewn from dark stone, backlit by the filtered sunlight across the expanse of Glen Coe. 

Nearing the top, it became clear that our mountain stood at the foot of giants. The Ben Nevis range disrupted the horizon with its snow swept summits and wild ridges. Between us and those peaks was wild moorland, a sweep of scarred bogs and blankets of indomitable heather which ran from the snowy horizon to our feet and over the edge into the glen. Glen Coe’s wild beauty, its natural passageway into the depths of the highlands may be now tamed by a road, but the glens and mountains around it, those that weren’t ground down by glaciers, still appear as gnarled and wild beasts. Grotesque upwellings of ancient rock, marked by eons of battles with the elements, still fighting for another day in the unreliable Scottish sunshine.

Ben Challum

After I was told to stop playing with her Dad’s icepick and to leave it in the boot, Emma and I left the car at a lay-by outside of Tyndrum and set off up Ben Challum. This walk had been much debated due to potentially bad conditions in terms of visibility, also it was damn cold. However, I was confident that Ben Challum would not only be safe, but an easy winter walk, doable even in lower visibility. So we headed up, over the railway and followed the fence to our right. The famously boggy slope wasn’t particularly nice but soon we reached patches of snow and places where the bog’s surface was frozen, we were able to speed up. At a rocky promontory, we stopped for fig rolls (the English equivalent of the world’s best hiking food, ma’amoul) and looked back to where we had come from. We had emerged from the valley’s early morning haze and into the bright sunshine. The sky was a bleached blue and a few clouds moved inoffensively across it, while some whispered through the forest, interweaving themselves with its fabric, feeding the mosses on the dark forest floor. Opposite us, Ben Lui and its smaller companions were mostly clear of the clouds and covered in snow. A stunning omen of things to come and a fantastic view to take in while stuffing one too many fig rolls into your mouth at once. 

We traversed a few deer fences and properly entered the snow. First, it sat in the hummocky troughs of the rippling hillside but soon we reached a small frozen plateau. Just beyond was a dip and then a seemingly endless slope into the cloud. We followed footprints in the snow that came up to our knees or thighs depending on where we stepped. The sun was trying desperately to burn through the cloud, to warm our backs and reveal the views we knew lay beyond the pale, but all we got was a diffused orange light as we climbed higher. We reached a false summit, warm from the battle with the snowy terrain but aware of the chill of the ferociously cold wind whistling over the wide ridge, so we kept moving. We passed boulders and outcrops that had thick growths of grey ice plastered to the windward side and headed down into an obscured valley, or depression, or something. With those conditions, it was incredibly hard to judge distances. Was that a far away mountain or a five-metre-high rise, was that a huge valley or something we could walk across in a minute. It turned out to be the latter and we climbed up the other side to find the ridge that would take us to the final summit climb. Despite the low visibility and the cold, we were completely in awe of the landscape around us. Without the open skies for reference, we were held in a sort of ethereal realm, devoid of detail, following footsteps into the nothingness. Arcs of wind-sculpted snow brought us to the final white dome, the final ascent. Half way up I saw something unlikely and called back to Emma to hurry, there was blue sky, there could be a view. 

View? That doesn’t quite do it justice. As the wind tried desperately to throw us both to our deaths, we stood in awe. A single shining ribbon of silver danced its way across the crimson moor far below, the valley sheltering it from the fierce wind and cold that had dumped snow in every probing gully and doused every summit in snow deep enough to smooth them into bulbous, featureless and pristine hills. We left the way we came, aiming to get to the car before sunset but found it difficult due to the maddening beauty of a clear Scottish day. The high and hazy clouds had been moved on by the wind, torn from their low lying bottoms that still remained in the valleys, now ragged and dissipating in the piercing sunlight. Ben More and Stob Binnein watched us from over the wide and intricate network of slumps and ridges, frozen lakes and boggy plateaus. They watched us head towards the sun and slowly leave the snow behind. But perhaps more importantly they watched Emma leave her car keys behind, somewhere in that boggy snowy nomansland. She realised twenty minutes later and ten minutes from the car. There was no way we were finding those keys, so we headed to the car and Emma called her dad (shout out to Alex). While he drove to our rescue, through the mountains in the dark, we stood in the lay-by, ate the rest of the food and managed to stave off the worst of the cold by entertaining each other. Even so, Alex came to the rescue just in time because despite being very amusing people, after an hour and a half of standing in a lay-by in the dark at -6°C, there’s no amount of laughter that will substitute sitting in a warm car.

West Coast Road Trip 

Just back from my Caucasian meanderings, Emma and I had a Scottish adventure lined up so with our bags packed and a loose plan in mind we set off from Glasgow to Morar. This small village on Scotland’s west coast sits on the half mile long river between the British Isles’ deepest body of water (Loch Morar) and the famously beautiful beaches dotted along the estuary, called the White Sands of Morar. As we drove along the coast, the sun beginning to set we were astounded by the coastline of bare rocky islands and complex bays. We pulled up to the village as the sun was finishing its twice daily catch up with the horizon and we felt giddy at the prospect of wild camping on the famously beautiful beaches. We negotiated some sheep and got down to the beaches in no time, each scalloped bay a luminous swathe of pure white even in the smothering twilight. We sought out a sheltered spot and set up the tent before total darkness set in. Happy with our little pitch, we were unprepared for the night to come. It started with the sonorous tickle of sand blowing against the tent’s canvas, but with each passing minute the sand’s scouring action became more deafening, it cascaded off the tent in sheets and piled up at the sides. The wind however was what kept us awake, each percussive gust slapped the square faces of our tent and turned them into unwilling sails, forcing the tent in on us. We were pinned down, harangued and battered; our canvas cage took a furious beating through the night.

In the morning, after not a single wink of sleep, the worst of the wind had abated and we decided to get an early breakfast of bacon butties. We stumbled over to a small beach, taking in the stormy views of the islands on the horizon. The left hand isle, Eigg, was smooth and sloping towards the horizon like a slowly sinking tanker relenting to the waves. The right hand isle, Mull, was prehistoric, its silhouette rising like the scaled spines of an ancient lizard. We watched as the winds attempted to defile the defiant turquoise of the bay in front of us and continued to blow the skies into an uncertain frenzy. After bacon we felt better but still bleary eyed, so we decided to sleep in the car for a few hours before heading onwards towards our ferry to Skye. 

After an unsubstantial sleep, some of the best baked goods anywhere in the world and a windy ferry we arrived on the Isle of Skye. Hang on, I’ll rewind for all you people wondering about the baked goods. Rewind for those of us teetering on the edge of diabetes and heart “complications” to tell you that there’s nothing complicated about it… sugar, grease and salt aren’t good for your body but THEY’RE BLOODY NICE. The food we obtained from the Bakehouse in Mallaig was lovingly crafted to be basically fatal to human beings. I got a frisbee of bread chock full of tooth-rottingly sweet caramelised onions, crumbly cubes of salty goats cheese and herbs? I guess there were some herbs in there. I genuinely don’t remember anything between me eating my first mouthful and then, some time later, walking to the nearby bin covered in stray pieces of cheese, sweating onion grease and smiling the grin of a man who’s just been allowed to consume a frankly obscene amount of food. And the best bit? I had bought dessert. I sat down to my apple pastry. A couple of bites… gone. It was one of the best apple things I’ve ever eaten. I want to curl up and live as a pub dog, but for the Mallaig Bakehouse. My job role would be to clear up dropped croissants and stroll about looking happily overweight. Then I’d cop it covered in crumbs. A noble death indeed.

Worried for Emma’s mental state after no sleep, her mum (shout out to Sandy) did her thing. When something needs doing, people need persuading, a war needs waging, a case needs solving or bones need breaking, Sandra is who you call. She’s a laser-guided missile, a bloodhound after a scent. I guarantee if the CIA had got Sandra on the case, Bin Laden would’ve been yanked out of his cave in time for dinner. This case was much more simple, find somewhere for us to stay on Skye within a few hours. Now this was summer (the grey skies do suggest otherwise but this is Scotland) and so rooms are hard to come by, but it wasn’t long before someone relented and gave us a house. A whole house. It might’ve smelt of cigarette smoke but we got in and Emma slept for the best part of 18 hours. 

Skye’s the Limit 

Recovered and raring to go, we set out for a big day around Skye. We only had the one day because there was plenty more west coast to see and not a lot of time to see it, so we set off for the Old Man of Storr. A classic on any Skye itinerary, the Old Man was bringing in the crowds. The car park was heaving but we eventually got parked and made it up to the Sanctuary, where strange dark rocky pinnacles rose from the grass below a dark cliff, not long after we reached an incredible but busy view. However, it wasn’t long before misanthropy and curiosity took us from the main trail and towards some life threatening cliffs. Unfortunately they were topped, like a grassy wedding cake, with a lady posing outlandishly in a disgustingly instagrammable flowy dress. The shamelessness of these influencers, who grow in number year on year, ruin these places of quiet contemplation. To them, the joy I get from just looking at stuff, just experiencing things with my eyes, must seem like Victorian whimsy. A charming relic of human behaviour from a bygone era. We waited a while to see if the photographer and model would leave soon after we arrived but no, there was no amount of passive aggressive standing that would shift them. So, instead, we climbed upwards, finding a better view of the Old Man of Storr before heading back down to the car, with Emma climbing to the pinched base of basalt for some perspective of the scene. 

To finish the day we continued up the Trotternish peninsula to the Quiraing, another feature of the huge escarpment that runs the length of the peninsula. In the Quiraing this takes the form of a huge row of basalt ramparts, a formidable natural fortification of dark rock rising from a tartan patchwork of rolling hollows of heather and marshy grass. We walked along the escarpment on the well-made path overtaking slow walkers left, right and centre. Soon the mindlessness of the track began to grate and so we decided to scramble around some of the strange rock formations. First, working our way up into “The Prison”, a vertical rise of bare rock resembling a medieval keep. Inside the prison were three towers that we climbed and clung to in the gusting wind, watching the primordial battle of sun and cloud play out on the landscape. After clambering down, we scrambled up the slope towards the cliffs opposite the prison, picking our way along a boulder-strewn gully to reach a mountain refuge. A sheer-sided cauldron of volcanic rock, whose base was carpeted with grass, held us and sheltered us from the vicious winds that whistled through narrow gaps. We revelled in our fantastical glade for a long time, taking every opportunity to explore the nooks and crannies. At the end, before descending a Tolkien-esque ravine through the mountain, we found “The Needle”. Like the Old Man of Storr but less bulbous, this rocky pinnacle stood above “The Prison” and the rolling expanse of heather, separated from the buttressed mountains as a solitary aggressive vertical feature, a lone soldier standing beyond the unbroken palisade wall.

Gruinard Beach 

The plan after the Quiraing was to head to Torridon, camp and do some hiking in the area over the coming days. But on leaving Skye, the weather in Torridon was leaning heavily towards the apocalyptic. After considering the evening’s options while having an expensive but tasty dinner on the shores of the beautiful Loch Carron, we decided to head further north to escape the rain. A few hours after driving through Torridon’s localised microclimate of utter misery, we arrived at a lay-by on the side of a remote unlit road at 11pm, time to find somewhere to camp. We knew we wanted to camp on Gruinard Beach, which was somewhere off to our left, on the other side of a maze of sand dunes. So, we grabbed what we needed, donned the head torches and set off. On the way, we spooked a gang of deer on a nocturnal jolly but we soon made it to the shore. We turned off our torches to walk along the beach with only the guidance of the gently lapping waves to our right and the abundant starlight from above. Beneath our feet the sand was wet from the recently receded tide and our unwelcome footfalls brought critters stirring from the sand. We found somewhere relatively flat to camp, squeezed onto the grassy edge of a dune. With our torches back on to assist in tent duties, we could no longer see the dissipating spume of every wave’s grasp over over the sand but could hear their pendulous actions. The back and forth of the ocean’s ragged edges, the calm breaths of a sleeping beast, a wild and unfathomable foe at rest under a cloudless sky.  

The morning was calm and we felt in desperate need of a swim. I changed my mind by about mid-shin. The water was deceptively Caribbean in appearance but decidedly Canadian in Celsius. After poking my head around the corner to see the perhaps even more stunning beach next door, I got the shoulders under and dipped the hair in for a “wash”, but decided that I wasn’t suited to the life of a seal, and instead decided to run lengths of the beach. We made more bacon butties (basically the only correct food for a post-camp morning), put down the tent in swarms of midges and got off the beach before the worryingly 3D cloud formation decided to dump its contents onto us. Before we got to the car however, we met a lady with conspicuously bare feet who stopped for a chat. She was lovely and had dogs, but I was mostly occupied by her feet which looked hard enough to shape sword on. She mentioned in passing how she walked everywhere barefoot and all I could think was, “no way” *high levels of silent sarcasm intended*. All I’m saying is she’d give Samwise a run for his money on the flanks of Mount Doom. 

The Scone and Seal – That’s a pub name if I’ve ever heard one

After a river gorge, a stop in Ullapool to try the famed “Seafood Shack” and a wet wipe shower, we were on our way north again. We travelled strange single track roads through odd little settlements, discovered beaches, waterfalls and mountains we had never heard of but eventually made it to Moira, our host for the next couple of nights. Moira, as an eccentric, self-deprecating, welly full of energy, was exactly the sort of person you’d expect to have a bothy just sat in her back garden. Her BnB was just outside Kinlochbervie, which is more of a smattering of houses near a harbour in the middle of nowhere, than a village. Moira had been hosting a couple travelling and working from their van/BnBs for months and now we were going to be staying in her bothy. Before we arrived the couple had basically taken over her house and now with us, I was worried we’d be in Moira’s way but she obviously loved having people around. We used her kitchen for dinners and in the morning, the breakfast part of BnB was taken to another level. She promised us, “just a little something to keep you going, it won’t be much,” so we had bought Weetabix to fuel the old furnaces. She lied. Each morning there was a selection of cereals, toast, juice and tea or coffee. Then a full fried breakfast? How did this woman know that I also go by, James Slater “emptier of pantries”? Thinking we were done, I was content. A plate of big, freshly made scones straight from the oven? Another course? MOIRA GETS ME. We waddled out of there and that solidified our plans for the day; we needed to walk that off. 

Sandwood Bay is a mile long beach just south of Cape Wrath, famous across the country for its isolation and pristine nature. There is no road access to the beach, only a 6km walking track from a hamlet just down the road from Moira. The 6km track was easy walking and we crossed the dunes and onto the beach with plenty of time to explore. The atmospheric chaos of the Scottish west coast during this week had the big waves not really knowing what to do, curling, chopping, smashing and crashing around in fits of spray. Sea birds plied their backwash, navigating the swirling currents of air with unconsciously deft flicks of their sleek wings, to suddenly tuck them back and fall from the sky. Through the white ranks of sea birds, falling and climbing as if in a choreographed dance, the giant sea stack of Am Buachaille (the herdsman) stood on a weather-beaten island below sandstone cliffs. As the banks of misty rain drove along the beach’s mile of sand, we sought shelter behind a dune, watching as the stack faded into obscurity. 

When the rain abated, we went to see the river which drains the peaty freshwater from Sandwood Loch into the sea. We crossed it at a wide and rocky section and then climbed the headland on the other side. There, far enough away from the rigours of society’s expectations, Emma went full geologist. And we all know… you should never go full geologist. We picked our way over the bands of Lewiston Gneiss, a rock that formed around three billion years ago (before oxygen even appeared in Earth’s atmosphere) and examined lots of nice fragments of rock. The Gneiss’ bands weren’t uniform, its surface was a mess of beautiful stripes, bubbles and swirls from when the rock was super heated and pressurised. That jazzy rock was a perfect place to sit and gaze along the full length of Sandwood Bay. That mile-long strip of sand now hosting a few walkers and a big seal, was a favoured landing ground of Vikings, inspired legends of mermaids and ghosts and still extends as a giant toppled gravestone to the many shipwrecks that lie beneath the sand to this day. 

We left Moira’s on the only truly sunny day of the entire road trip and knew that if we didn’t make the most of it we would kick ourselves. The plan was to drive across Scotland to the East coast and then to a campsite in the Cairngorms. Driving this small, untouched road linking Inverness to Cape Wrath we were alone in a stunning expanse of Scottish wilderness and that’s when we saw a bridge crossing a beautiful river. We thought it would be a nice little stop, check out the bridge, watch the flowing water and take in the mountain backdrop. As soon as we got to the bridge and looked downstream however, we spotted the river pooling into wide and glassy meander, above which was a thin jetty a few feet above the surface of the water. As we ran over to see what it was, a huge fish jumped in excitement next to me, spurring us on to continue our curious little adventure the only way a fish knows how. There was no sign, no mark on the map but this airborne jetty seemed to be there solely for the purpose of jumping into the river. A wild swim in the sunshine? Don’t mind if we do. We spent the next hour or so running and jumping into the water, both of us smiling ear to ear.

After stopping by for an incredible meal in Fortrose (IV10 Cafe Bar Deli) we got to our woodland campsite in time to collect some firewood and chill as the midges went away and the sun went down. There’s not much better than being sat around a fire, mesmerised by the flames swiping at the sparks bursting and swirling into the darkness… but also just poking and prodding at the fire with various sticks… that’s pretty magical too.

Final Thoughts 

I believe Scottish weathermen must be psychopaths. You wouldn’t become one unless you revelled in dishing out pain and disappointment. They are the psychopathic bereavement counsellors of the meteorological profession.

Anyway, Scotland is the closest to the wild we can get in the UK. The vast ancient forest that once covered the land is gone but the decimated landscape is unapologetic in its newfound stark beauty. Rules and regulations, permits and bureaucracy have ruined much of England, they have squeezed out our connection with the open air and the natural landscape. So go to Scotland, wild camp, swim in the rivers, shelter from the Atlantic winds and enjoy Britain’s last wilderness while it’s still there.