It is partly through Glaswegians that we see the organised walking movement first coalescing. In 1854, Hugh MacDonald published Rambles Around Glasgow, which described in detail long walks out of the city, along with examples of flora and history. In 1892, it was a group of working-class Glaswegians who formed Britain’s first ever rambling federation: the West of Scotland Ramblers Alliance. It should also be borne in mind that for a few of the manual workers, trapped by economics in Clydeside’s squalor in the earlier years of the nineteenth century, the wilds of the Highlands and Loch Lomond were just a few miles away. This represented a treasure that had been stolen from them, this is where some of their families had once lived and farmed before the notorious Clearances.
On Rannoch railway station platform, you drink in the silence after the train moves away. Look up at the low-pressing clouds, and you think: surely this land of hills and water and heather has always been like this. It cannot have changed in over 100,000 years. Yet can this be true? James Hutton, an eighteenth-century Scottish farmer who was also a pioneer in the science of geology, was among the first to grasp the vast yet infinitesimally slow processes that are wrought across the millennia. In 1785, Hutton wrote wrily:
As there is not in human observation proper means for measuring the waste of land upon the globe, it is hence inferred, that we cannot estimate the duration of what we see at present, nor calculate the period at which it had begun; so that, with respect to human observation, this world has neither a beginning nor an end.
That is, human observation as it stood; yet Hutton was to bring his own human deductions to the subject and, in doing so, spark a religious uproar akin, if on a smaller scale, to that of Galileo. For Hutton was among the first to understand, and assert, that the earth is very, very much older than the Bible seems to say. He was among the first to see that the earth has been here rather longer than humanity itself. This sense of an unfathomably ancient landscape is certainly what pulls walkers here.
In this age of ubiquitous car travel and GPS orienteering, Rannoch Moor remains a formidably inhospitable prospect. It covers a vast area, with very few signs of habitation for miles around. There is only one road in and out, the rest is rough track, often leading nowhere. The nearest big town is Fort William, and Fort William is not a big town. Rannoch itself comprises two or three private houses, and a larger house which is now a popular hotel among keen walkers. Nor is this easy territory, by any means. Even though the Scottish authorities have been assiduously laying down paths and cycle routes all over the country, Rannoch remains one of those ancient regions that should always be hard-going.
Before the twentieth century, the remoter regions such as Rannoch were regarded by many travellers as utterly deadly. It was impossible to live upon, and difficult to cross. The forests were thought to be filled with lurking wolves with a taste for warm flesh. There was no perceived beauty here, just harshness, and silence, and everything inimical to human comfort. In the winter months, the vast black tarns that mark this watery plateau freeze over. The lochs quiver with tiny ice-cold waves. The earth sparkles with frost. In the nineteenth century, Robert Louis Stevenson’s historical adventure Kidnapped features a lengthy passage in which Alan Breck and Davey Balfour cross the treacherous ground of Rannoch Moor. They attempt to conceal themselves from troops and nearly perish in the process. More harrowing was the real-life construction of the West Highland railway line across the moor. Not only were the workmen fighting against the most savage weather conditions, they were also pulling off the unthinkably complex engineering feat of laying heavy steel lines across bog-land.
Even the doughtiest of poet-walkers William Wordsworth, weathered and wind-beaten after years tramping his beloved Lake District, could not find it within himself to recommend Scottish wildernesses to his readers. ‘In Scotland and Wales are found, undoubtedly, individual scenes, which, in their several kinds, cannot be excelled,’ wrote Wordsworth, ‘but in Scotland, particularly, what long tracts of desolate country intervene! So that the traveller, when he reaches a spot deservedly of great celebrity, would find it difficult to determine how much of his pleasure is owing to excellence inherent in the landscape itself: and how much to an instantaneous recovery from an oppression left upon his spirits by the barrenness and desolation through which he has passed.’1
Surprisingly, Wordsworth failed to see what many other walkers could: that the ‘barrenness and desolation’ could actually be powerful attractions in their own right. It is the perpetual draw of these places that takes us right back to the paradoxical roots of walking for pleasure.
In a centrally-heated, fleece-swaddled age, it is often difficult for us to imagine just how harsh some British landscapes can be. One dark December a few years ago, I was visiting family in Scotland. Fancying a brief taste of wilderness, I took a train to Kingussie, not too far away from Rannoch Moor, and from there followed a path directly up to the great shouldering hills that encompassed the little Highland town. There had already been snow that day, and more was falling; the air was so cold that I could feel it sharp in my lungs. Good though my boots were, the road I was walking up was glassy with impacted ice. The going was slow, but it was so intensely enjoyable that there was no question of cutting the walk short.
On this particular road – private, though without any of the big, irritable signs that remind you so – the gradient was acute and it was not long before I was above the tree-line, looking upwards at shimmering hills of white, luminous against a sky of solemn dark grey. Save for my boots croaking and crushing the snow beneath, there was not even the riffle of any wind in my ears; the falling snow was sound-proofing the entire world.
But then came the reminder of just how indifferent to life this beautiful world was. There was a small iced hummock on the left of the road, on it sat a small, shivering hare. I wondered why it did not leap away at the very sight of me and as I drew closer to it, I saw the snow dappled with the brightest red, and one of the hare’s legs seemed to be hanging half off. The hare watched me as its tiny muscles shook, and its entire body rippled with convulsive shudders. I drew closer, a weight of dismay in my stomach. Then I walked on. To this day, I still feel a pang of remorse about this. Could I not have put the small animal out of its pain? Or perhaps – on the wilder shores of compassion, and utterly absurd, but it did flit through my mind – have tucked it inside my coat and taken it to a local vet? The notion of killing it did fleetingly occur to me: perhaps stove in its small skull with a big stone? But I also knew, almost without having to think about it, that I would bodge the job through urban squeamishness and incompetence. I wouldn’t hit hard enough, or would hit the wrong spot, or the hare would try to escape and the leg would become even more mangled. I would somehow end up adding to its pain a hundredfold.
In that one moment, the winter wonderland feel of this land had been exposed for what it is: a perfectly impervious, blank wilderness. The snow was still falling, big fat chunky flakes. I walked on, higher and higher up this road, which now, in its dazzling whiteness under that dark iron sky, was snaking up between two glacial hills.
It never occurred to me on that mid-December afternoon – with the temperature falling still further – that I was vulnerable too. I was stupidly oblivious to the never-ending snow, and the distance that I was covering. I didn’t have a hat, or gloves. I was, quite simply, not dressed properly. There came a point, after about two hours of walking, that I was still not at the peak, nor within sight of any pleasing views of lochs or forests. There was now just the whiteness that seemed to throb and pulse. And the sun was very low; looking eastwards, the clouds had shades of both pink and green in them. It was time to turn back.
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