Читать книгу Not the West Highland Way. Diversions over mountains, smaller hills or high passes for 8 of the WH Way's 9 stages онлайн

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So Part Two has tips for beginner backpackers. And after the tips, the trips: a couple of two-day hikes designed to get you going on this game of carrying the big rucksack along the valleys and through between the hills. Learn how to do it not by deep study of the literature, but by doing it, and doing it wrong. Discover for yourself the setting up of a damp camp when you’ve been walking in the rain for four hours. Find out that you should have put your dry pants in a plastic bag. And if you did manage to forget the tent pegs, there’s a bothy alongside to crawl into with the sodden sleeping bag, and a train home tomorrow so that the suffering is at least reasonably short.

Part Three is the proposition that Glasgow (or Loch Lomond) to Fort William is one of Scotland’s good walks, so simply ignore the WH Way altogether. Here are the damp little paths along Loch Etive, and the peaty ways through the heart of Rannoch Moor.

After two days of waterfalls and windswept heather, come down to Kinlochleven (say), do your shopping, eat a big hot meal plus sticky toffee, stay in the hostel there. Set out again at dawn, or whenever you manage to get out of bed (let’s hope it’s quite early). At the back of Kinlochleven is a wooded valley. Waterfalls splash down into a river that zigzags across slabs of bare rock. Walk up the slippery stone path below the birches and the oaks. After four miles you come up to this bleak, bleak reservoir, the Blackwater. You find the old path through the peat, and you come to a lochan, and beside it there’s a beautiful bothy that hardly anybody uses, as it’s not really on the way to anywhere. But if a roof of any sort is repugnant, you can carry on and camp beside the water. All night the ripples murmur against the stones. And at four in the morning, the curlews are crying in the air above your tent.