My Day

How was your day? 

Mine was like this:

I woke at 6:30 with the sunlight streaming through the window of the Schoolhouse bothy, a few kilometres South of Oykel Bridge. The evening before, the bothy had filled up with two women from Colorado, mountain biking down the Cape Wrath Trail, and a man doing the coast to coast offroad on a bike. There is a relay race across all the Munroes (hills over 3,000 feet in Scotland, there are 284 of them) for women over 50, and two of the participants' friends dropped in to say hello. The bothy is a good one - three rooms, each with wooden benches on which one can sleep. There is no water or electricity. 

I washed and shaved in the river by the bothy, made porridge, packed my bag and left at 8. 

In the morning, if the path is straightforward, I move along quickly, humming a tune, or watching the skylarks, the butterflies or the dragonflies that buzz around the track. Today started on good dirt-track, so by 10am I was having a wee snack of dried fruit by the Oykel river. A couple of fishermen drove past - the Oykel is a salmon and trout river. 

At Loch Ailsh I passed Benmore Lodge, the only two-storey building that I would see today. A woman was out walking her dogs, so I said hello to her and one of her dogs. I had lunch at 12 - cheese and oatcakes. Water comes from the streams that I pass; I'm a bit careful, avoiding any that could have had animals or humans in them, but most of the water is fine - peaty and delicious. 

About 3km North of Benmore Lodge the track stopped and became a narrow path. By now I could see the bealach - the gap between two mountains. I have become fixated on bealachs - they are the tough bit of the day's walking, and this one, a 500 metre climb, was toward the end of a long (34 km) day. By 3pm the view of the bealach was good, and I estimated I'd be through by 5. 

I checked the weather (er, by looking at the sky - there is no mobile signal here!) and reckoned that it would stay dry at least until I was through. So I ate an energy bar, drank a load of water, and headed up. 

 

But as sometimes happens, what you can see, and even what you can see on the map, are not quite how it turns out on the ground. The path disappeared, the hillside became very steep, and then I rounded a bend to see that I had to walk around the inside of a corrie to get to the bealach on the other side. (It's the corrie on the South side of Ben More Assynt, if you have a map.) 

 

The corrie, at Ben More Assynt

 

 

I was pretty tired. I could - in extremis - have camped in the corrie, but it would have been very rough. The clouds were starting to come down, and so now I was worried that the hill could disappear into the clouds, making the route invisible. (There are no clear paths up here - you end up following deer tracks...) 

So I pushed on, finally getting to the bealach at 6. The far side was very steep, and the path narrow, so I came down very slowly. I was aiming for some flat land near a loch, but I really did not want to walk after 7pm - that was already 11 hours of walking and around 34km. Happily I found a wee patch of grass by the river at exactly 7...

Looking back from the bealach

I pitched the tent, had a wee lie down, then boiled up some water and had a beef and potato stew - a freeze-dried meal. Hot food, any hot food, tastes totally delicious after a day like this. 

The midges are out, so I'm writing this in my tent. It's a bit windy - I'm camped at 250m - but I'll sleep like a log tonight. 

I have seen a total of four people today, after leaving the bothy; that's quite typical out here, and there have been days when I've seen just one person in a whole day's walking. 

So that was my day.