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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When you start walking you hold onto your Mummy’s hand. When you start walking the rather longer distances with the big rucksack, the Mummy is the West Highland Way. It tells you where to go, it makes sure you’ve got somewhere safe to spend the night, it cooks your tea, it even fusses about trying to keep your socks dry. Then as you start to grow up it lets you wander off out of sight – but you’d better be back by teatime.

Grown-ups don’t want to be home in time for tea. Grown-ups stay out late and get into the nightlife. We want to drop our packs under a pylon-free sky, look around and see no street lights, sniff and smell heather – not petrol. We want to gather stones to shelter the stove, and hang our socks in the tree by the river. We want to watch from the high corrie of Ben Lui, as 40 mountains go grey and purplish against an orange sky.

On the south ridge of Ben Lomond (Routes 2 and 3), looking to the tops of the Arrochar Alps (Route 18)

In Part One, the use of the WH Way’s overnight stops and baggage transfer allows backpacking, as it were, but without the backpack. When Part Two attempts your first two-day tent adventure, the ground alongside the Way turns out to be just grand for that as well. There is genuine wild country in the southwest Highlands, between Loch Lomond and Lochaber: big beautiful valleys with craggy mountains rising on either side. But there’s also a pretty good path, there are bothies, there is that bus stop for Glasgow just one day’s walk ahead. Corrour railway station stands at the geometrical centre of nowhere at all: it has a café, and a youth hostel, but not a road leading to it.