Awake in my bunk this morning I savour my body in it's many aches and it's rested readiness. Both feet are blistered and stiff and swollen and sore but everything else is fantastic. After a hundred and twenty miles in four days my resting heart rate is forty four beats a minute and my muscles and joints feel fine.
The body is the spirit. That all the experiences and sensations conventionally labeled as spiritual are physical in nature seems obvious to me. The low morale which accompanies physical fatigue. The uplift which follows a good night's sleep and a decent breakfast. The frontal lobe brain injuries which destroy love and conscience. William James gives us a bundle of examples of religious conversion coming at the back of a vigorous walk on the hills. Art is physical. Music is sound. Bach's two violins may invoke in us the most angelic of visions, but it begins in neurons firing in the brains of the violinists, it continues in the enervation of muscles, the motion of limbs, the friction of bow on string, the vibration of air and eardrum and ends in the brains of the listeners.
So much for proximate causes. But why music at all? In Songlines Bruce Chatwin speculates that the first languages were sung. And, yeah, a huge fraction of the world's people speak tonal languages. For me, the answer to, why music, lies in the beat. All music begins with the beat. What is it, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and fifty beats a minute? The pace of sustained, aerobic running, endurance running, a hundred and fifty or so footfalls to the minute, springs from the genetic memory of the persistence hunting of our ancestors. Music is running remembered. Selah.
I’m up and out by nine thirty.
The Great Glen is one of the most distinctive features on a physical map of Scotland. A natural fault line, it cuts across the narrowest part of the Highlands from Inverness in the north east in a straight line south and west to Fort William. Three great lochs almost fill the valley, Loch Ness, Loch Oich and Loch Lochy. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a huge engineering project, the Caledonian Canal, carved channels and built locks between these natural waters and forged a route navigable from the North Sea to the Atlantic, allowing sea-going vessels to avoid the dangerous seas around the north end of the island of Britain.
The official start (or finish) of the seventy three miles of the Great Glen Way is up at the castle. I head up there from the hostel and down the other side of the hill. It’s a sunny morning with a touristy feel to it.
I am careful making my way. I’ve got lost on the way south out of Inverness before and wasted hours on the wrong route. I get lost quite a lot, by the way. But if I’m careful I shouldn’t get lost on this trip until I get past Motherwell.
In a little grocer's shop I buy a couple of cans of food and some chocolate bars. Outside the shop a group of three teenage girls want me to go back inside and buy their cigarettes for them. Nah. I continue through the park and the waterside paths which take me through the southern suburbs of Inverness. Yes, suburbs as well as outskirts. Maybe there’s a suburban chip shop. Too late, too late. On the other side of Inverness I begin the climb out of the urban plain into the forested hills. Soon I pass the place I intended to camp last night so I feel as if I’ve caught up with myself. I manage some running. It is a joy to be running on paths rather than roads. And now I can’t get lost. I’m on the way.
As I run grass whips at my bare legs and I remember to be paranoid about ticks. In Britain ticks are known to carry Lyme disease and two other diseases I can’t spell but am frightened of. Ticks are bloodsuckers. They embed their mouth parts in your flesh and suck your blood until they are full and then fall off, bloated and gorged. If you find a tick attached to your leg you can’t just pluck it off because those ‘mouth parts’, yeah nothing as simple as plain old teeth, are spirally and barbed and just fixed into your flesh. If you pull at a tick before it’s ready to let go these disgusting alien mouth parts are likely to remain embedded in your flesh to rot and fester and give you gangrene till the only way to save your life is to have the infected limb carved off. I’m not really paranoid. I just don’t like the idea of weird alien species burrowing into my flesh and living off my life’s blood. Another reason to keep an eye out for them is that they like it dark and damp and hairy. So if you don’t spot them when they’re on your legs they crawl upstairs and live in your nads. I check that my special tick removal tool, the Tick Twister, is in a convenient pocket and try to relax.
For the first part of the route the path drifts away from Loch Ness up into the forest. I keep myself going with thoughts of lunch at the Abriachan Campsite. Yes I’ve been down this road before. It’s comforting to be on familiar ground. Even if it is mostly Forestry Commission land.
The Forestry Commission has a reputation for sucking the life out of the earth with endless gloomy acres of alien pine trees. Their website claims that is all in the past, they are completely reformed and they are now committed to biodiversity, environmental sustainability and saving the planet. Yeah. ‘We’re from the government and we’re here to help.’
I plug on through the forest. The track varies. The older roads are easier on the feet. But the newer ones, recently carved by Forestry bulldozers have been surfaced with broken stones which stab at my tender plantar tissue. Now and again I turn the wrong way on an ankle. Ow! Shit!
Look, I’m not going to bang on endlessly about how my feet hurt. They hurt. OK? Relentlessly, and in ways I never imagined possible. But I’m not going to keep on about it. It’s boring me and I’m sure it’s boring you. So let’s just assume, unless I say otherwise, that my feet hurt.
I’m having to walk more than I want to. I’m not a huge fan of walking. I mean I’m happy enough to walk myself down to the shops or around an art gallery. But to actually go for a walk as if it was some kind of separate activity worth doing in and of itself seems complete madness to me. And there are people who sneak up on you with walks. My older sister does it all the time. You go to Anne’s for dinner and you’re sitting there afterward wondering how she can justify calling that a pudding when it didn’t have any chocolate or any cream in it. And suddenly everybody’s pulling their boots on and we’re going for a walk. Jeez. I find myself wanting to let them go without me so I can search the cupboards for chocolate biscuits.
Right now what I want to do is run. Technically, the difference, the only difference, between walking and running is that when you walk your rear foot doesn’t leave the ground until the leading foot lands. If you’re back foot takes off before the front foot hits then you are running. That’s the physical difference. And it sounds simple. It sounds like nothing. But in that brief moment when neither foot is in contact with the earth you are flying. And as you continue to run those moments string together into one continuous soaring flight of freedom. Your muscles feel it, your blood feels it, your heart feels it. The difference between walking and running is the difference between talking and singing.
But I don’t let it get to me. Injuries all heal eventually. My feet will get better and then I’ll be running again.
About fourteen miles from Inverness I get to Abriachan Campsite. The trail is winding its way through a wood when you become aware of hand-painted signs inviting you for coffee and cake, or camping, or caravan based bed and breakfast . If you are tempted by the signs, and honestly it’s worth it just for the sheer hand-knitted lentil-pressed eccentricity of it all, you can camp in their ecological campsite, wash in their eco-shower, take a dump in their eco-toilet and throw your garbage in their eco-waste disposal. At Abriachan you get the feeling they really do believe in saving the planet. These guys haven’t just stuck a green label on it. They are living the life.
The last couple of times I’ve stopped for coffee at Abriachan a lovely guy called Ruari has been there to serve my cafetierre. He is tall and gaunt and bearded with an impeccably authentic highland accent and a dry, iconoclastic wit. When he first saw that I was traveling in shorts, he delivered a doom-laden lecture on the natural history of ticks of which is the root of my fear of the little freeloaders. Before Ruari ticks weren’t even on my radar. Am I grateful for that?
Right now I’m feeling good but pretty hungry. Ruari isn’t there but Sandra serves me a bowl of chunky lentil soup with grainy bread. Lovely. I sit outside with the chickens free-ranging underneath the table and the rooster strutting around like a complete cock.
While I’m having my coffee an Australian cyclist heading north stops for a cuppa. Well, he might have been a New Zealander but the difference is not something I can get myself to care about.
When I ask to borrow his map to check some distances he’s like, ‘What? Haven’t you got a map?’
‘No. I haven’t got a map. I’m traveling light.’
They give you a pretty generous jug of java at the Abriachan Campsite and the caffeine has got me pretty agitated so I’m bristling up at the guy’s reluctance to help me out.
‘What’s the problem? Is it like a treasure map or something?’
So he digs it out of one of his panniers and I scan it to remind myself of the road ahead.
He pooh-poohs the idea of my reaching Fort Augustus by the end of the day and I wish him well on his journey ahead to Inverness and his flight back to the other side of the planet.
I buzz ahead on fake coffee energy and pretty soon I’m out of the little free enterprise enclave of the Abriachan Campsite and back into the Forestry running along their busted-rock roads on my busted-feet feet.
After a while the route is running along the hills above the lochside and there are, off and on, some pretty spectacular views of Loch Ness. The coffee jag wears off and I slow right down again till I’m pretty much dragging my arse.
Dragging your arse is a pretty miserable experience but if you find your pace and stay hydrated and munch on a square of chocolate every so often you can get through it. What makes it really miserable is rain. Now it has rained on me before on this trek, everything from drizzle to out and out pissing rain. But the rain that comes down as I drag my backside along the road to Drumnadrochit convinces me that my rain vocabulary needs extending. I could call it pissing rain and let it go at that. But that really doesn’t get close to capturing the intensity of this downpour, the sheer relentless wetness of it all. No. Pissing rain will not do.
This is horsepissing rain. And my unwaterproof waterproof jacket invites it in. Down my back and into my pants and down my legs and into my shoes which are now getting wet from below and from above. My vision is a lens-wet blur. My chocolate wrapper wets to a pulp. Acceptance. I put up no resistance. I do not flinch. I embrace the footsore wetness which is my life.
Eventually I reach a road and it is downhill into Drumnadrochit. I love Drumnadrochit for its name alone, this perfect pair of alliteratively-linked trochees is so unashamedly teuchter-sounding. But it doesn’t go so far as to fall into self-parody like the unfortunate Auchenshoogle. Drumnadrochit. Isn’t it melodic. It deserves to have the Loch Ness Centre and to be the spiritual home of the Loch Ness Monster Mystery.
But today Drumnadrochit is drookit. And so am I. I use the public toilets and then I spend a long time in a shop trying to pick good things to eat. Mostly I just want to hide from the rain but tonight I will be wild camping for the first time and I want a nice supper in my tent, something tasty that I can eat cold. I buy tinned sardines and chocolate.
Drumnadrochit is another of those small places that you can just walk right through with little chance of getting lost so pretty soon I am walking uphill again past some holiday cottages and into the trees. I’m really struggling now and though I’ve only managed eighteen miles all day I decide to get off the road and pitch my tent. The land on either side of the road is fenced-off Forestry. I clamber over the wire and climb up the slope looking for a relatively flat space.
I unshoulder my pack and take out my tent. I love my tent. The Coleman Kraz X1 one-person tent I bought last summer in Tiso in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street has already served me well on the West Highland Way and in the southern Carpathians. It is small and light, just over three and a half pounds, and a fantastic bargain at eighty quid. It has a double skin so I’ll be sleeping behind a ventilated, insect-proof mesh which in turn is protected by the super-waterproof outer tent. It takes five minutes to set up.
The quality of the tent notwithstanding I make a complete dog’s dinner of pitching it. I’ve got it on a slant and the pegs are fixed to the forest floor in what is effectively mulch but I need to get my weight of my left foot. I give up and get inside. I unroll and inflate my mattress and get in my sleeping bag. As I eat sardines and chocolate I grudgingly reflect that the antipodean cyclist was right. I am a whole chunk of miles short of Fort Augustus.
I wake to the sound of rain on the outside of the tent. I am warm enough. The double blanket of cloud cover and forest canopy has kept the chill from my little green igloo. In the night I have slid downslope and am jammed against one edge of the tent.
I lie there until the need to pee drives me out of my sleeping bag. Actually, I only climb half way out of the bag. I unzip a flap of the inner tent and pee from the left lateral position directing the steaming jet out onto the dew-beaded grass. It’s a man’s world alright. I clean up and wriggle back into my cocoon.
If you’re covering twenty or thirty or more miles a day on foot, a fair amount of it at a run, and you’re going to be doing that indefinitely then you need to allow your body to recover as you go. It does that best when it’s asleep. Without enough sleep, fatigue will wear you down to nothing. When I’m tired enough I can pretty much sleep anywhere. I’m happy to curl up at the side of the road and fall asleep. But if you want to have a quick slumber session in the open air and it happens to be pissing down with rain you have a problem. So the best time to sleep is when you’re in your tent. And one of the joys of wild camping is that you can stay in bed as long as you want. It’s not like I have to clock in. I let the pattering rain lull me back to sleep.
Some time later I twist the valve on my mattress and let my body weight deflate it. I get myself out of the sleeping bag and roll it up. I have to roll it and squeeze it in just the right way so that it will fit back into its own tiny little bag. And in turn that tiny little bag has to fit into the tiny little space reserved for it in the restricted capacity of the twenty litre Salomon back pack. And I have to do all that rolling and stuffing inside my cramped little tent so that it gets packed away dry. Oh yes, once it is in it’s little bag it gets double wrapped in plastic bags so that the rain doesn’t get to it during the day. The Salomon pack, wonderful as it is, is not waterproof.
Once the sleeping bag is stashed away I roll and squeeze the remaining air out of the mattress. This is another item whose packing has to be done just so. It is waterproof though, so when it has been bagged up it gets strapped to the outside of the back pack by a little bunjee cord.
I find a pair of dry socks, may favourite Hilly Mono Skin running socks. I put them on my dry feet which I cleaned last night with baby wipes. Lovely. Wet socks get attached to the outside of the back pack in the hope that there will be enough sunshine during the day to dry them off. There is a plastic bag with an empty sardine tin, chocolate wrapper and used baby wipes. I tie that plastic bag also to the outside of the back pack where it will stay till I find a bin. From the pocket on the wall of the tent I take my watch. Nine thirty.
I stash everything that needs to be stashed in pockets and pouches and throw the back pack outside.
The rain has stopped now and I can see the crawling shadows of midges all over the outside of the tent. Midges are horrible. Only about, what, three millimetres long, they are slow, flimsy little insects, easily squashed. But it’s the numbers. Clouds of them, thousands upon thousands. They crawl all over any exposed flesh nipping and biting. They don’t bother you when you are on the move so when you are running or walking you are OK. But right now, when I am taking down the tent I will be most vulnerable. I take the Jungle Formula and spray my hands, rubbing it into the backs and palms and the webs of my fingers. I spray again and rub the liquid round my wrists and far up my forearms beyond where I will tightly velcro my sleeves. I rub it into my face, ears, neck, throat and hair. I wear my waterproof trousers so I won’t have to spend an age midgie-proofing my legs but I do rub some bug juice around my belly and back above my waistband. They have crawled up under my jacket before and left a big patch of their nasty little blisters.
Finally I put on my shoes. I have left this to last. Because for the first time since leaving John O’Groats I wasn’t able to dry them on a radiator last night. I put my dry-socked dry feet into the cold wet Wave Riders. I feel the cold wetness seep into my socks. Yuk. I tie the laces tight and crawl outside.
The tent comes down quickly. I work fast. The midges mob me and taste. They don’t Like the Jungle Formula. Ha ha. I fold the poles. I fold and roll and bag both inner and outer tents. I pull and count pegs. At last everything is stuffed in the back pack. I shoulder the pack and clip both belly and chest straps. I look around to check I’m not leaving anything behind. I walk down the hill and clamber over the fence. I’m on the road again.
Today is much like yesterday. I struggle up and down forest tracks more or less stony. But the route runs closer to the loch now, and often there are views down the long wide water and across to the hills on the other side. Now and again a white flicker of sail or hull gives scale to the immensity of it all. Remember, Loch Ness is longer than the English Channel is wide. And colder. That the world record for swimming the length of the loch is held by a woman is evidence that given a long enough distance and harsh enough conditions women can excel over men at endurance sports. Obvious really. Just think childbirth/man-flu. Still, I comfort myself that no matter how tough a woman is she still can’t take a piss without getting all the way out of her sleeping bag.
There is nobody else on the road. Apart from the shop assistant in Drumnadrochit I haven’t spoken to another human being since the cyclist with the pirate map at Abriachan. I wish I had a map now. It’s not like I’m going to get lost but I want to know where the next town is so I know when I’m gonna have breakfast. I try to remember what the next town on from the Drum is but it just won’t come to me.
It turns out that the next burg on the way south is Invermoriston. Of course it is. And fourteen miles and five hours later when I find it I am dizzy with hunger and drunk with fatigue. I walk past the Invermoriston Hotel. I am still blanking them because last summer they refused to serve me coffee one night at about nine o’clock when I was powering my way up the glen in an attempt to do the hundred and seventy miles from Glasgow to Inverness in five days. I needed to get a few more miles done before bedding down for the night and reckoned that a jolt of caffeine would be just the thing to keep me going. But although the restaurant and the bar were both open for some reason the making of a cup of coffee was a catering task too far. This is a big posh hotel for goodness sake. But no it wasn’t possible.
‘We have a selection of alcoholic and soft drinks.’ He said (I swear he did), indicating the gantry with a sweep of his hand.
I had the same thing in Edinburgh once. I asked for a coffee in the White Horse on the Royal Mile. The barman glared at me.
‘Ah’m jist here masel.’ (I’m working unaccompanied.) he said.
The clear implication was that he considered the making of a cup of coffee to be at least a two person job. Now, I’m not an experienced innkeeper. But I can make a cup of coffee all on my own. In fact, if I have a big enough kettle and a selection of mugs I can make coffee for as many as half a dozen people at a time. What is the big deal about getting a cup of coffee (instant would do) in a place whose business it is to serve drinks? That goes for the Invermoriston Hotel and the White Horse.
So I take a shortcut through the Hotel carpark scattering their too-tidy gravel as I go and I scowl through the windows at a couple of old ladies having afternoon tea. That’ll teach them. I stock up on tinned food and chocolate bars at the shop across the road and then follow the signs for the Glen Rowan Restaurant where they haven’t yet made the mistake of thwarting my coffee expectations.
I find I like the Glen Rowan Restaurant. It is light and clean and crisp. I am unwashed, unshaven and sodden-footed and definitely feel out of place, but the waitress makes me feel welcome. I plug in my iPhone for a recharge as I consult the menu. I go for the three-bean chilli with wild rice. It comes with fresh, leafy, tomatoey salad. Nice. I have room for an apple pie and ice cream chaser. Yum. Pudding is followed by a pot of tea. Aaaah! I note the gleaming chrome of the espresso machine behind the counter and I’m reassured that, had I felt the urge, the pleasant, efficient staff of the Glen Rowan would have been more than happy to serve me with a cappuccino, a latte or an americano as fine as anything you could get on the King’s Road. Lovely.
I don’t linger too long over my tea. I have miles to go before I sleep. I use the toilet, refill my water bag and get going. It has been showering on and off but it is dry as I leave the restaurant.
My pack never seems to be as light as I expect it to be. Full of water and with a couple of tins of food on board it is as heavy as it gets, which must be fourteen or fifteen pounds. That’s pretty lightweight but it’s still quite a load if you want to run. The food is lying pretty heavy too and the miles (about seven of them) between Invermoriston and Fort Augustus are a real slog.
It’s coming on evening by the time I get to Fort Augustus. As I hike into the town I find myself walking behind two young Americans. I’ve been starved of human contact all day so I’m leeching onto their conversation. One of them is telling the other that he is an engineering major and plans to be a project engineer. He explains in considerable detail to his less than attentive companion how he is going to achieve this goal. By the time our paths diverge I’m pining for the hermit life again.
Fort Augustus is a little place straddling the canal where a series of five locks slows the water traffic and marks the beginning of the channel from the great Loch Ness to the lesser Loch Oich to the south. The locks make an impressive focus at the centre of a pretty little village and it’s easy to see why the place is such a big tourist draw. From my point of view I am just happy to be hungry again because it would be a shame not to take advantage of the Canalside Chip Shop. Its yellow-painted front is right there facing the locks. I cross over the canal and pop inside. The Canalside Chip Shop works on a triple whammy of big portions, reasonable quality and low prices. I order a sausage supper.
Just so you know, when you order a supper in a Scottish chip shop, as in fish supper, haggis supper, pakora supper or whatever, ‘supper’ simply means ‘with chips’.
While I am waiting for my meal the two mature ladies who are running the show chat between themselves and with a variety of locals who pop their heads round the door from time to time. You could call it gossip. You could call it folk news. Whatever you call this verbal exchange of innuendo, opinion and speculation about who was drunk when and who is shagging who and who has just given their pregnant girlfriend a black eye it is much more entertaining than the career plan of the nascent project engineer.
I have my supper sitting outside being gobsmacked by the engineering wonder of the lock system and watching prowling tourists being similarly gobsmacked. It is quite gobsmackingly impressive.
The American engineering student was in the right place if he was looking for a role model. Thomas Telford was the designer, project engineer, what-have-you on the Caledonian Canal. Now I don’t want to go all tour-guidey on you but seriously, this guy was a legend. He also built the Gotha Canal in Sweden, other huge canals in England and Wales, Portsmouth Docks, the Menai Bridge, towns, more bridges, aqueducts and about a zillion miles of road including the A5, from Holyhead to London, yeah the A5, he finished it in 1826. Check him out on Wikipedia.
By the time I am struggling with my last few chips (I need the calories) my pyloric muscle is clenched as tight as a tick’s arsehole.
I walk out the other side of town along the wide, stony canalside path. The route follows the canal now and all I have for camping is a scrubby margin of land between the canal and the river. What river? I don’t know. I haven’t got a map, remember.
Once I am past the meagre outskirts of Fort Augustus I climb the fence and scratch around for a flat, dry patch of ground. I clear some raggedy undergrowth and pitch up, hammering pegs into the stony earth with a rock. I crawl inside, blow up my mattress and crawl into my sleeping bag. Pretty soon I am asleep.
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