West Highland Way Diaries: June 24-26, 2017
The biggest hill, two men in a caravan, the end.
June 24, 2017, Kinlochleven, Scotland
The month of June is generally accepted across most of the northern hemisphere as the first month of summer, though this news doesn’t seem to have reached Scotland. This morning I sat in the bunkhouse cafeteria, the weather misty and cold, with drizzle in the air. This would be annoying on any day of the Way, but was particularly annoying today, as today I had to hike the Devil’s Staircase.
The Devil’s Staircase is the highest point of the Way, and is considered such a hard climb that the general advice for that day of the hike is to start at Kingshouse and walk just ten miles up and over the hill to Kinlochleven.
The Staircase got its name from the soldiers who were part of a road building programme led by the English general George Wade. They were part of an attempt by the British government to bring order to Scotland and allow its troops to move more freely. The soldiers named the pass after Beelzebub because of the difficulty of carrying building materials over it.
However, there is also an apocryphal story about some men who helped to build the Blackwater Dam in the mountains around Kinlochleven. Once they were paid, instead of walking down into Kinlochleven, they decided to cross the Staircase and stay and drink at the Kingshouse Hotel. However, as the story goes, the walk was much harder than first thought, and some men died on the way. These two stories illustrate well, I think, why I was a touch nervous upon seeing the weather.
I walked outside to do that terribly British thing: look off into the middle distance, spot a piece of sky a shade lighter than the rest, turn gamely to anyone accompanying me and say, ‘looks like it’s brightening up!’ But it was hard to spot any such piece of sky, and after I was scared half shitless by a deer that I hadn’t spotted grazing right next to me - Kingshouse really is quite remote - I quickly texted my walking buddies Rik and Seb to get their estimated time of arrival.
They had clearly had a good night at the ski resort, for they had slept in and were planning on heading down to Kingshouse at about 11. It was not yet 10, and I looked at the clouds rolling in, ever more ominous, and looked at Alex and Sarah, the German couple I had drank with the night before, down on the trail. They had just set off, and when I looked up again at the sky, I decided that by 11 the heavens could have really opened, and I went inside to grab my rucksack.
The wind really picked up and I drove into it, pushing myself a bit harder than was really sensible given the climb ahead of me. But I was desperate not to have to walk up it alone, and after half an hour’s solid pushing, I caught up with my German friends. Not long after that Oliver the Belgian came into view, and we reached the bottom of the Staircase a foursome.
We pushed through the lower slopes and overtook two burly Scotsmen I had been perennially bumping into during the week. They nodded and said hello. I asked how they were doing and the quieter one, who really had hobbled rather than walked the trail, said in an impenetrable Scottish accent, “my fucking bastard knee is absolutely fucking fucked.” We wished them luck and pushed on, and about thirty yards later, safely out of earshot, Sarah asked me what he had said. Sarah, I should point out, speaks perfect English.
“He said his knee hurts,” I told her.
“Was he speaking English?” she replied.
“Sort of.”
The Staircase goes up the hill from Kingshouse in switchbacks, and what really hurts on the way up, more than your knees or your thighs, are your hips. Mine screamed as we reached the top, and when we finally did crest the summit, the sight of an honesty box full of chocolate and drinks nearly made me weep. I sunk an Irn Bru in double quick time, and we stood there admiring the astonishing views. It was a significant moment; we had crested the Way’s highest point, and from there it felt all downhill.
It wasn’t, mind you, there really was a lot of fucking uphill still to come. The moment was made sweeter by the fact that about 15 minutes after we reached the top, we were joined by the two burly Scotsmen, who had hauled their aching bodies up the climb. We all had another drink to celebrate, and then set off down the other side.
Hiking the West Highland Way is full of humbling experiences, but the one we all collectively experienced on the descent of the Staircase hit more than the rest combined. We were trundling down the hill when we heard a gruff, “excuse me!” come from behind us. We barely had time to move out of the way before a lithe and athletic man sprinted, literally sprinted, past us. We all stopped and looked at each other to confirm that we had all seen the man. We had. We had all seen him move what would be a fair speed on flat, even ground. On the rocky and uneven terrain of the Way, on a steep descent, it was ridiculous.
It dawned on us as we were passed later in the afternoon by a second runner that there must have been a race. There was. We had managed to time our walk to coincide with the annual West Highland Way race.
Every year in June, a few hundred people who have taken leave of their senses line up in Milngavie in the early hours of Saturday morning, intending to run, non-stop, all the way to Fort William. A lot of finishers cover the whole 96 miles in less than 24 hours and are in Fort William for last orders. The man who passed us just over the summit of the Devil’s Staircase was Rob Sinclair, and he was on his way to setting a record race time of 13 hours, 41 minutes, and eight seconds. A ridiculous achievement, and one that made walking it in seven days feel quite sedate.
We reached Kinlochleven long after Rob Sinclair had been and gone, but without incident, and Alex and Sarah checked into their cabin they had rented. I was nervous about the night to come. Dean and I had been planning to camp in Kinlochleven, as every website we had checked told us that there wasn’t a warm bed to be had. I still had the tent, but after the incident at Inverarnan, I wasn’t exactly itching to climb back into it. It was also meant to rain hard that night, so I entered Kinlochleven intending to do anything, anything, to get a bed. Oliver the Belgian had seen the weather forecast and said he would take a night off wild-camping and join me in my quest.
We went to the place that Alex and Sarah had checked in after hearing that they had a bunkhouse but were told they had no vacancies. We walked around the town, stopped at both pubs, and discovered to our dismay that there were no beds at either. We had swiftly run out of options. We decided to try one more time at the first place and decided if they hadn’t had any cancellations, we would give in and ask for tent pitches instead. We walked inside, and while Oliver chatted to someone he’d been bumping into on the trail, I asked again if they had any vacancies. The man paused and looked at me.
“How many of you are there?” he asked with an arched eyebrow.
Now, I’m not proud of this, but I thought that my likelihood of getting a bed would be improved if I were just one person, and I really, really didn’t want to pitch my tent that night, so, to my shame, I leaned forward conspiratorially and said to the man behind the counter, “if there needs to be one of us for a bed, there can be one of us.”
“Oh no!” he said brightly, “I need two of you. He’s with you, isn’t he?” he flicked his head towards Oliver.
“You need two? He is! We’re together!” I cried, shamelessly manhandling Oliver away from his friends and towards the front desk like I hadn’t just been ready to drop him like I’d never even met him.
“Listen,” the man said, “if you two give me 50 quid you can sleep in the caravan out back. It’s not technically mine, it’s my son’s, and it’s not hooked up or anything so you’ll still need to use the communal showers, but if you’re interested, you can have it for the night.” He could have told me I would have to shit outside and wipe my arse with nettles, I still would have said yes.
“It does need to be cash though,” he said.
We ran out to the nearest cash machine to get the money and handed it over in fistfuls, and he led us to the caravan out back. He was right, it wasn’t hooked up, and really was only just fit for habitation, but it had a roof that wouldn’t leak and an electric heater that would either keep us snug and warm, or would short circuit and burn down the caravan in roughly 20 seconds.
We didn’t sign any paperwork, and I think that had we died in a fire or through carbon monoxide poisoning or some other gross negligence, we would have been buried out in the highlands and people would still today be wondering where we had got to. But we didn’t worry about that, and we showered, shaved, and, when Rik and Seb joined, descended on the local bar.
To my considerable delight, there was a live band expected that night, and all the hikers that were in Kinlochleven flooded into the bar and drank and drank and drank. We were well on the way to merry when the band came on and the locals joined in, and by the time they had been playing for about an hour we were all up and dancing and flirting with sixty-year-old local women, forgetting that we had fifteen more miles to walk tomorrow.
The band played on and well, but towards what looked like the end of their set, I noted the absence of a song that I felt would be particularly appropriate. Not content with having yet to insult a local that day, I drunkenly stumbled up to the lead singer between songs and said into his ear, “how much would I have to pay you to play The Proclaimers?”
He gave me a look that said he’d been asked the same question by a different drunken Englishman every Saturday night for the last ten years, and would be asked it for ten more, and rolled his eyes practically to the back of his skull and said, “there’s always one.”
They played it and we drank on into the night.
June 25, 2017, Fort William, Scotland
I woke this morning with a head filled with barbed wire, and stumbled into breakfast to discover Oliver, Rik, Seb, Alex and Sarah all in similar states. We were all bleary eyed and regretting the fact that we had gone for a heavy night the night before we finished the trail. But, we had decided the night before to finish the walk as a six, and after pootling around the town for a bit to feel more human, we donned our rucksacks and waterproofs for the last day and walked onto the Way.
The walk out of Kinlochleven is uphill, and once we crested the treeline we were pelted by a swirling wind and rain that came at us sideways. I was damp through my clothes and relieved that as the morning wore on the clouds went away and the sun made a welcome appearance. We all struggled up the few miles of hills, and by the time we stopped for lunch along a remote stretch of path, most of the climbing was complete.
The last day was painful. I had sprained my left foot and it had started to swell. I had fought off blisters for the most part but the few that had graced me by then became quite persistent, and my back and shoulders were very ready to not carry around a week’s worth of damp clothing and camping equipment.
But, despite my body being ready for the end, my mind was not. I had grown to love the rhythm of the hike. Each day you had nothing more to worry about than getting dressed, putting on your backpack, and walking a certain number of miles to that day’s destination. Once you got there you would shower and shave and head straight for the pub and get very drunk with all your fellow hikers. It’s a wonderful life and if money and time were no object I would buy supplies in Fort William and turn around and walk right on back to Milngavie.
But I don’t have the time and money to do that, and we walked the final afternoon in cheerful contentment, knowing that we were close to achieving what we had come to Scotland to do.
We descended off the trail proper and reached the road that led into Fort William. We wandered down it, gradually getting further into civilisation. Cars passed and people with pushchairs strolled down the pavement. It was weird. Anyone we had seen walking for the last seven days was either doing the whole West Highland Way or was at least doing some serious hiking. Seeing people walking simply because they were popping to the shops, or out for a Sunday afternoon stroll was jarring.
Eventually we came into town and reached the original end of the West Highland Way. The walk used to finish at the edge of Fort William, and at the end of seven days’ hard walking, hikers were expected to celebrate next to a roundabout. It looked shit. I was incredibly grateful that they had extended the Way by a mile and that it finished in the town centre.
It’s a pretty good last mile, too. The Way takes you right down the high street, a cobbled road that has the typical hiker’s fare; pubs, restaurants, cheap hotels, and lots of outdoors shops. The people of Fort William walked past and didn’t even glance at us, clearly used to nearly 50 years of tired and dirty looking hikers arriving in their town every evening. We finally reached the end; a sitting bronze statue of a man on a bench, rubbing his feet.
The Way rather appropriately finishes next to a pub, and some of the other hikers we had seen along the way came out to congratulate us. We had dinner, went to our respective hotels to shower and become vaguely presentable, and hit the town to get really quite drunk one last time. We had done it. We had hiked the West Highland Way.
June 26, 2017, Leeds England
This morning, I woke, bleary-eyed and hungover again, and limped through the town centre to Fort William train station. I was on the early train out with Alex and Sarah. We spent four slow and pleasant hours on a rickety old train to Glasgow, going almost exactly opposite the way we had spent seven days walking. Occasionally we would glimpse the trail and remark wistfully that just a few days prior, that had been us.
I had left Rik and Seb in Fort William. They are staying day or two longer, and then going on to sample more of Scotland’s delights in Glasgow and Edinburgh. I’m extremely grateful to them and to Alex and Sarah and to Oliver the Belgian, for keeping me company along the Way once Dean left. The walking and the scenery and the drinking were all pleasant and nice, but the people are what make an experience, and I met some of the best.
I left Alex and Sarah at Glasgow, they too are planning on continuing their holiday in Scotland, but by car, rather than on their feet. I don’t blame them. It took me three more trains to get back down to Leeds, and once I had left all my fellow walkers behind, I realised that I was dishevelled, dirty, and smelled like shit.
I received many looks this afternoon from middle-aged women that told me I looked like something they would wipe off the bottom of their shoe. I wanted to tell them that I had just walked 96 miles, thank you very much, and that I had battled the elements and blisters and the fearsome Scottish weather to reach Fort William, all the way from just outside Glasgow. I wanted to ask them what they had done with their last seven days. But I didn’t.
Some housekeeping
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