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‘Why?’ He wanted to sit by the fire and read the Sunday papers.

‘Because it will be pitch-dark long before he gets back to where he started, let alone where he was supposed to be going. It’s pouring now and he’s ten miles off course in the middle of nowhere.’

‘He could be anyone. He could be some Eastern European axe-murderer.’

‘Imagine if it was you, or us.’

So we ignored our turning for home and carried on the hill road. We caught up with him toiling into the dusk, a dark figure on a lonely ribbon of tarmac, just before he began the ascent to the moor. He didn’t look like an axe-murderer.

We picked him up at the bottom of the hill on the Moor Road.

‘Would you like a lift?’ we said. ‘We heard you were lost.’ Speaking slowly and clearly so he could understand.

He smiled and put his sodden pack in the boot and climbed into the back seat, dripping. He seemed profoundly grateful and he expressed it in English. Excellent English, in fact. Our crazy foreigner was a Canadian university philosophy lecturer, a handsome, intelligent man in his thirties with a gentle manner. He’d flown over to attend a conference at Aberdeen University on, and I think I remember this rightly, Thomas Reid, a little-remembered Scottish moral philosopher of common sense during the Enlightenment. With the conference over, our academic had had a few days to play with before his flight home, and had a fancy to try the long-distance footpath that wends from Glasgow into the Highlands. After leaving his B&B in the morning, he’d missed a turning and had walked all day in the wrong direction. Looking back now, I suspect he was a dreamy, erudite man who just wanted to walk in the mountains, rather than a practical map reader.