Changes

I've got David Bowie's Changes playing in my head, in these recovery days after my long walk. "So I turned myself to face me" seems like a suitable description of some of my mountain moments, and now it's time to turn and face the strain. 

But I don't want to face the same strains as before. I don't want to drown - as I have done recently - in a news agenda that I cannot respond to in any constructive way. Yes, I made a donation to a Ukrainian charity, but that feels like a neutered response to all that human suffering. I want to engage with real people, not words on a web, to use the hour a day I was previously spending lost in news websites, engaging with friends and contacts. I have spent six weeks away from daily news, and not missed a minute of it all. 

It's hard, in civilisation, to get the same emotional intensity that you get on the bealach that you have just climbed, and from where you can see the world - or at least the last few and the next few hours of your walking world. It's relief, and a yell to the sky, and a pounding heart, and clean wind in your face, and a hug from the earth. At an arts festival in Edinburgh on Thursday, dancing my socks off to a thumping beat in blue and pink light, I get close. No clean wind, and it's packed humanity not a lonely hillside, but that reaching down inside until you are one with your world is the same. Dance does that for me. So, more dance. 

And time. It seems so much more precious now. In the mountains I lived in the moment, now, here. Back in civilisation (if that's the name for the train to Cambridge, from where I'm writing this) I can feel the world seeping in, the cares and preoccupation (a time word!) sneaking into my head, unwanted. I want to fight that, to stay in the moment, for as long as the moment lasts. 

Universal Basic Land

My mum used to argue that everyone in Scotland should be given half an acre and a cow to sustain them. Her idea was that Scotland's 5.5 million people would easily fit into its 19.3 million acres. 

That's true, but many of those acres are hilltops, including the 282 Munros, and a lot of it is the peat bog that I have walked across and frequently sunk into. So half an acre each might just be feasible, with the cow standing on relatively dry ground, but the distribution would have to be carefully planned. 

I'm not going to defend my mum's argument, but a radical redistribution of land makes a lot of sense. In most of the villages I have passed through, there are signs offering employment. Everything from housekeepers to rangers for the military range at Cape Wrath. Hotels, restaurants and shops are desperate for employees.

 

A job, for a Duke

 

But when I asked John Ure at the Ozone Cafe on Cape Wrath about this, he said that the problem was housing. There were job opportunities, but no one could find a home in the North because so many were taken for holiday lets. Young people move away to the big cities because they can't set up an independent life in the Highlands. 

Alongside these Airbnb-villages are the big estates - tens of thousands of acres owned by the few. Many of these acres are appropriated former common land. 

It would not take much to start to rebalance land ownership, using that common land approach; for each person in a village (I'm thinking of Durness, or Kinlochbervie, but it could be any village), the nearest private landowner with, say, more than 2,000 hectares would be required to hand over, say,  a hectare (just over two acres) per head of population as common land. For Kinlochbervie's population of 410, that would be a pool of common land of 410 hectares, plenty of space to allow the construction of social housing, a small industrial area, and for farming. 

This would be a one-off gift at a set date, to avoid the problem that as these rural populations recover and grow, the landowner has to keep on handing over more land.

Like Universal Basic Income, UBLand takes a resource and shares it out more fairly, regulating the excesses of the market without destroying the market economy. Yes, Grosvenor Estates would have to give up land, but the amounts (410 ha for one village, a few hundreds for others) are derisory in relation to the total holdings of the big estates. 

And yes, this is an idealistic proposal, and I'm not expecting UBLand legislation at Holyrood any time soon. But we need more, more radical solutions to the problem of inequality in land distribution in Scotland: what's your idea? 

Just don't insist that everyone gets a cow. I've met a few on my stroll up Scotland, and I've learned to keep my distance.

Cape Wrath

I'm here. Thirty eight days after setting off from Jedburgh, I arrived at the Cape Wrath lighthouse at 10:30 this morning, Sunday 12th June.

 

Just one more bog from the Cape

 

Cape Wrath felt very wrathful today; I walked here through a storm of southerly (luckily, I was blown along) winds and heavy showers. But as I reached the Cape - the lighthouse is set dramatically on a cliff-top - the sky turned blue, and the sun made the raindrops sparkle like jewels. 

My last night on the trail was  Strathchailleach bothy, the former home of a naïf artist and recluse, James MacRory-Smith, known as Sandy. All of the internal walls of the tiny, dark, two-room cottage, are covered in painting and colours, including paintings of strangely exaggerated bodies, and of an unclothed mother  and child in the tropics. Walkers - and one cyclist - arrived in from the storm so that this morning there were four of us ready to do the last three-hour trek across the bogs to the Cape. It was good to have company, because out here there are no signposts, no clear trail. 

Relief in a storm - I've found the bothy

Sandy's paintings

 

And that has been one of the wonders of this wander up Scotland. No signs, no trail, no path marked on a map. Just land - much of it bog - and an endpoint for each day, 20-30km from where you start. It feels like a metaphor for our lives; we roam across time, each finding their own path, criss-crossing with others, and occasionally hitting the bog. It's the people I meet at the intersections of these paths, and the loved ones who are there at the start and the finish, that make the hard route worth taking. 

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. 

Scot Land

Scotland has a lot of land. It's huge - millions of square kilometres of moorland and forest - I'm walking across some of it on the Scottish National Trail. 

Most of the hills and valleys I walk through are empty of humans. Deer, some sheep, wild birds... but no people. This place used to support a population - I pass the ruins of old clachans (wee villages of stone houses) every day here in the North (I'm writing this in Ullapool.) One clachan I passed today had the ruins of six wee houses, and so probably had between 20-40 people living there at one time. 

 

 

We like it, like this; green hills, the emptiness, the 'wilderness'. So we preserve it that way. But why? Why not repopulate the land? Not all of it of course, but Scotland has so much that it could afford to put people onto, say, 10% of its moorland, and you'd barely notice.

The clachan I passed today for example - next to a river that could provide energy with a micro-hydro scheme, with flat, fertile riverside land for a market garden (providing for the hotels in Ullapool), and a high-speed internet link for work and school. It could support - again - five or six families. 

But of course that's just a pipe dream. Because the land owner wants to keep the land free of people, so that wealthy clients can hunt deer and grouse across it. Exploiting the land as a business, not for the community. This is the colonial view of land -where natural resources, which should be the property of all of us, are exploited by the few. 

The land owner has that clachan because his ancestors 'cleared' the villagers out, preferring hunting over the villagers' smallholdings. He had that right, because he had been granted the land by the Crown, or had grabbed it by force. So, a murky past, that now looks like respectable ownership. Huge areas of Scotland's land is held by a very small number of people; 432 people own more than half of Scotland's private land. 

This combination of our 'wilderness' aesthetic, and the colonial exploitation of land, have frozen Scotland's hills and valleys as bare green spaces, empty of the communities that this land could sustain. 

It can't last like this. Climate change will create mass emigration from the new deserts in Southern Europe, and from the water resource wars of North Africa and the Arab-speaking countries, to Scotland, Norway, Sweden and maybe Siberia.

For that future, but also to put right the murky past, and to create a vibrant, community-based future, Scotland should bring communities back into the Highlands. 

A Cairn Society

I've just crossed the hills to reach Ullapool, guided along the way by cairns, the wee pyramids of stones that indicate the pathways. Today has been sunny, but in any kind of bad weather the cairns are a lifesaver, guiding walkers safely through the snow or fog. 

 

A gift, in the hills

 

The person who starts a cairn is a mountain philanthropist. They are on the route, they know where they are, so they don't need the cairn. They pile up the stones for the people who come after them. It's a wholly altruistic act, thinking only of the others who might pass that way. There is no ego involved - you don't leave your name on the cairn - and none of the 'warm glow' that people get from other forms of philanthropy - as happens when you give money to a needy person on the street.

I put a stone on the cairn as I pass it, to say thanks to the person who started it. 

I Vont to be Aloyne...

I'm in the valley of the River Loyne, and totally alone. 

 

Crossing the bealach to Loch Loyne

 

The only evidence of other humans is the footprints that someone left in the muddy path, maybe three or four days ago. There are far,  far more deer prints than human prints. 

Barring an accident, which would be very complicated to resolve out here, I'm happy, alone. It's the distance, the repetition of foot after foot over kilometres of terrain, that has a calming, hypnotic effect, easing away worries about being alone. 

(If you like your glacial geomorphology, this is the place to be; U-shaped valley, misfit stream, roches moutonées in abundance, and a huge corrie at Coire nan Leac. It's absolutely spectacular.) 

West of Mandalay

I'm back on the road again after a few days of rest and recuperation (and some serious carbo loading) near Inverness. Tonight I'm camped near the river Garry, west of Mandally... which is a wee bit smaller, colder and midgier than its Myanmar nearly-namesake.

 

 

Tent on the beech...

This is the start of the long section West then North to join the Cape Wrath Trail. Heeding the advice I've had I'm carrying seven days' supplies, so my fat friend is fairly bulging, despite unloading as much unused kit as possible in Inverness. 

I have also changed out of walking boots and gaiters, and into light, quick-drying trail shoes. So many people - who have done Cape Wrath - said that leather boots simply never dry out.

So, heavy pack, lighter shoes... I'll probably imbalance... 

Bothy Blether

I'm now out of the Cairngorm, and having a wee rest in Inverness before tackling the big, boggy, Cape Wrath section of the Scottish National Trail, starting at Fort Augustus. 

For full disclosure, that means that I will skip a 60km section between Kingussie and Fort Augustus. Various reasons; my much-loved niece has just given birth to a wee boy in Inverness and I want to visit, I need to do a serious resupply because the next section passes through very few villages, and I'm physically pretty tired after walking here from the Borders, so I need a few days of recovery time. I'll do the missing section another time.

Back in the Cairngorm, after two days of rain, hail, fording rivers and plowtering through bogs (my daughter commented that Scotland is the only country in the world with bogs on slopes - how come the bog doesn't drain?) I reached the Ruigh Aiteachain bothy in Glen Feshie.

What a luxury! A stove with cut logs to feed it, a dry floor to sleep on, a fresh-water spring and composting toilets. I'm not being ironic - after days in the rain and the bogs these are real luxuries. 

But the best of the bothy is the people. Folk who have tramped up the mountain to get here; Charlie, cheery cyclist enjoying early retirement by taking off on long-distance mountain adventures, comes to Scotland regularly on the sleeper train. Dave, the ecologist with his lovely companion, a sheepdog who just lives for the sticks we can throw for him. And Nell, on a Mountain Leadership course, heading off just after dawn the next morning to climb another Munro. 

The relationship is ephemeral - we are unlikely ever to meet again - but it's instantly friendly, funny and warm. We blether about everything from the inevitable discussion about kit and how to get that rucksack lighter, to land management, Scottish independence, and the feeding habits of the buzzard. We can talk freely, taking care not to offend, because by the morning we'll be gone. 

The bothy levels us all out. It really does not matter where we come from, what we work at, or how much we have in the bank. We have all struggled to get here, and we'll struggle to go on. 

I know that I've been lucky with this, my first bothy experience, both because the bothy is unusually well equipped, but also because these three are all good people; there are grim tales of bothy nights shared with party-people on a mountain rave. 

But with these people, we created a bothy community in minutes, talking and sharing and looking out for each other. It's surprising that humanity doesn't do better at communities, and that we spend so much time, and so many lives, at war. 

The Clearances

On the rough path between Comrie and Loch Freuchie, there is a point (it's at NN 794 309, if you are using the OS maps), where the valley flattens out, giving a broad south- facing flood plain on the Invergeldie burn, sheltered from the west and east by ridges that rise to 700 metres. 

Today there are a few blackface sheep and a couple of grouse here. But if you look closely, you can see the outlines of at least six old black houses, the typical homes of the Highlands.

 

Remains of a Clachan in the Oykel valley

This was a clachan, a home for maybe six families. For a moment I imagine the children running and playing between the wee thatched cottages, the dark, squat Highland cattle grazing in the fields up slope, with tatties (potatoes) or neeps (turnip) growing in "lazy beds" in the in-by fields, and someone singing in Gaelic as they hang out the washing up from the burn. A tough life - there is no point in romanticising it - but a community. 

And then, probably around 1740-1850, the land on which these people had lived for generations was handed out, as an estate, to a man of wealth and power. He would win this privilege from the English conquerors or from their lackeystocracy, the Scottish dukes and lords.

The new landlord wanted the estate for hunting, and the clachan and its farming was in the way. So one night his 'factor' (estate manager) went up the valley with a few men and drove the cottagers out, "clearing" them from the estate. 

Some went to Glasgow, to work in the satanic mills, and maybe someone got a passage to America or Canada; she might be your ancestor. But the community was destroyed, as the colonial masters wished. 

I stopped in the clachan, trying to hear the old voices. And felt anger at the injustice done to these poor farming folk, the injustice of an English Empire determined to crush the Scots.

But later, calmer, I channel the anger into learning, and buy Sir Tom Devine's 'The Scottish Clearances - a History of the Dispossessed ". And learn - of course - that the story is more complex. Devine's history cures the anger, but leaves a sadness for that Gaelic clachan and its lost community. 

On Comfort

I slept last night in a real bed, after dinner around a real table. Tonight I'm in the tent, and my bed is the grassy forest floor. I ate supper straight out of the pan, crouched by the tent. 

On the walk out of Edinburgh, I passed the bus stop for the Express bus to Glasgow. I could have been in Glasgow in an hour. But I've chosen to walk, and the journey will take me three days. 

Why do we do this? Why do we, the walkers, the long distance runners, the explorers, why do we choose discomfort, when comfort is so easily available? 

I'm walking, not catching the Express bus, because I want to meet the people, learn about Scotland, and because I want to go at Nature's pace, slowly through the countryside. 

Tonight, camping (and thus not in a comfy bed) a wee deer came by, grazing a lush green clearing in the forest here. I would not have seen her from a bus, or from a comfortable home. 

 

 

In the woods

 

And on the walk today I spoke to at least a dozen people, including a couple of guys using magnets to 'fish' metal from the canal, a fisherman who called me 'buddy' and someone who said I looked 'fresh' and ready for the rest of the Trail (that was at 5pm when I felt anything but fresh.) 

The deer, and the chat - that's why I take the rougher road. 

Travellers

The Scottish National Trail starts in the wee village of Kirk Yetholm, two kilometres from the border with England. 

Kirk Yetholm was until the early 20th century, the 'capital' for the Roma people in Britain. It was where they crowned the "Gipsy" King or Queen, and the wee cottage where the Roma leader lived was called, with a nice sense of irony, "The Palace".

The Palace looks onto the village green and The Border pub (go there, it's really friendly). Camped on the green, exercising to the full his right to roam, was Jack, who is walking from John O'Groats to Lands End, four times the distance I will do in my Stroll. 

Jack travels light, with a tarpaulin supported by walking poles, and the minimum of kit. He wants to see life, escape from the claustrophobia of a planned existence and a career. He wants to learn how to do things, because he knows that there is a climate crisis coming and he does not want to be caught out. He is eloquent and an easy talker (he says it's because he worked in a bar, but I think it's natural).

In the hostel is Sue, who volunteers there. She's retired, but still runs at 1000Kw of energy, cycling, walking, scuba diving and travelling. She's firm with the hostel residents (she described one as 'gobby' after he objected to making his own bed) and travels to escape from rules and tedium. 

Sue and Jack have broken out of the conventions and borders that box us in, but have kept a strong sense of community and humanity. They are fitting people for a village where the Roma spirit lives on.

My Fat Friend

 I have a fat friend.

He's an aquaintance, a new friend. Someone I'm going to have to get to know over the next two months.

He's seriously fat. On the scales he weighs only 20kg, but to me, he's like a tonne. Heavier when he's wet, of course, and he's going to get very wet.

He sits on my hip bones, and sways gently as I stroll along.

He's black. And yes, that's a purposefully lower-case b. Because he's only black on the outside. Inside, I'm trying to think of him as sky-blue, a blue as light as air, a blue that floats along with me, on the trail. It's the only way I can cope with his weight, to think of him like this.

Inside, he's soft and warm. Downy soft, and hot-tea warm. And he's protective, because he's the one who is bringing along the plasters and the first-aid kit, as well as the maps and the compass.

It's a complicated relationship, him and me. Yes, it's new, so we're both exploring the other's vicissitudes, and limits. I need him and he, frankly, needs me - otherwise he'd get nowhere - but mutual need is not a great basis for a friendship. That sort of relationship can be pretty brittle. I'm not sure where the relationship is going - although I can clearly say that it is heading north. It's possible we'll come to like each other, in time. But not before we've taken a good few knocks. 

He's called Vaude. Has his name tattoed on his back, just so you don't forget it (is this arrogance?) It's a German name, although it sounds better if I say it in a French accent. I quite like the name. It sounds a bit like baud, which (as you'll know) is a measurement of the speed of data transfer. I like that speedy connection, as though he and I could fly over Scotland at the speed of light.

 I'll let you know later how we get on, Vaude and I.

It's a beautiful day, in Scotland

A reminder that the weather in Scotland is wet.

Here is the forecast for the first few days of my Stroll up Scotland:

It's always sunny, in Scotland

 

I must be mad. Here in Catalonia it's 24ºC and blazing sunshine.

In Praise of Walkhighlands

 I'm preparing for the big Stroll Up Scotland, and there is one source that I turn to again and again - Walkhighlands - https://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/

 

Founded by Helen and Paul Webster in 2006, the site contains the information that I need to make this walk work. There are extensive route commentaries, gear guides (I've taken advice on tents and cooking equipment so far) as well as links to Ordnance Survey maps. One user has posted video blogs of sections of the Scottish National Trail, which help me understand the terrain. The news section includes features on rewilding and land use - all of which help understand the context of the terrain I will be walking through.

 

The site is funded by donations from its users, and from the John Muir Trust and NESTA. So it is independent and objective, important in a site that touches on the health and safety of its readers.

Thank you, Helen and Paul!