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. 

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.