This rigorous environment offers an earthy, authentic brand of walking that demands a certain level of self-reliance. In contrast to the situation typical on the European mainland there are no manned huts linked by waymarked trails here, and no hot meals and warm beds are laid on in the hills. Roads are few and far between, and towns, ski centres and other developments thin on the (generally boggy) ground.
The scale of the country makes it ideally suited to long testing journeys on foot, strenuous peak-bagging missions over all the major tops in a range, or forays far into the backcountry to climb an isolated mountain. Great Mountain Days is built around such big ventures. Popular challenge walks, such as the Cairngorms 4000-ers and the Lochaber Traverse, are described alongside others less widely known but of similar merit; the common thread is size and toughness. Despite their demands these walks are aimed at a broad hill-going demographic, from superfit fell runners racing the clock to overnight backpackers in search of solitude, and from fair-weather summer walkers to seasoned winter mountaineers.
Backpacking on Beinn Dearg Beag (Walk 9) – hard work, but worth the effort
The author makes no apologies for the emphasis on difficulty and distance, but the desire to challenge should not be confused with exclusivity or elitism. With a little determination and a following wind these routes are achievable by any reasonably experienced and averagely robust hillwalker, and there’s no imperative to run around them with your head down, ignoring the scenery. If it ever looks a bit much, most routes can be shortened or broken into separate smaller chunks, and there are suggestions for short cuts in the walk chapters.
The rewards of going the extra kilometre are many. A quick there-and-back summit dash may fill a spare afternoon, but why climb one peak when you can do several? If the half-day quickie is a three-minute pop song – over before you’ve got stuck in – then the epic slog is more like a symphony – daunting, hard work, but richly complex and of deeper, longer-lasting significance. The cares of daily life tend to diminish when considered from a great height and distance, so the further we travel and the longer we go for the better.
The route to a truly great mountain day is through extended effort, with mud, sweat and maybe even a few tears along the way. The more improbable something may look on paper, the greater the satisfaction on completion; the harder and more prolonged the exercise, the bigger the buzz. Scotland’s mountaineering and hillwalking pioneers understood all this. The distances casually covered by doughty Victorians and Edwardians such as Naismith (of Naismith’s rule fame) might dwarf a typical 21st-century hill day – and all without the benefit of lightweight gear and nutritionally balanced (if barely edible) energy gels. It’s amazing how far a little grit will go.
Following a cross-country through-route is a fulfilling way to travel among mountains, but it’s not what this book is about. These routes are hill walks, wedded to the high ground and mostly circular (with one or two exceptions); they are not extended journeys from A to B. Any of the walks described in this book can be knocked off in a single (if in some cases rather stretching) day, but they might equally be spread over two or three – a change in pace, weight and emphasis that brings its own rewards. The divide between day trips and overnight backpacking routes is porous, and can be passed through at will. The information box at the start of each walk includes notes on wild camping and bothies.
Bigger might be better in some cases, but a key premise of this book is that the pleasure that a hill can offer is not proportional to its altitude, and that neither Munros (peaks over 3000ft) nor Corbetts (2500ft–2999ft) have cornered the market in quality. Among the chosen 50 walks, worthwhile trips at lesser elevations include the edge-of-the-world Uig hills of Lewis (Walk 50) and Skye’s uniquely eccentric Trotternish Ridge (Walk 48), both in a different league from any number of duller Munros.
The Scottish guidebook canon is already well loaded with tomes on the popular hill lists. This guide is not another to add to the pile. Although you would accrue many Munro scalps (and Corbetts, and the rest) working through this book, scores of them are omitted too. The aim is not to tick through lists, but rather to present coherent and satisfying walks on the ‘best’ mountain groups, letting topography call the shots and adding a minimum of contrived wiggles. In some cases the neatest big route on a massif will just happen to miss a couple of peripheral Munros; those who feel obliged to climb every mountain can then choose to follow the relevant detours.
Writing a selective guidebook means making hard choices, distilling the finest quality of hills and routes out of the baffling number of possible candidates to produce a blend with a fair flavour of the country as a whole. The collection is a personal ‘best of’. Not everyone will agree with all the choices, and inevitably some fantastic and popular hills have been omitted. For instance, neither Stac Pollaidh nor Schiehallion are overlooked through any fault of their own, but simply because they aren’t ideally incorporated into a round of sufficient scale. A collection of big walks needs a bottom line, however arbitrary, and in this book it’s roughly 20km. There is no particular upper limit placed on distance, although things have been kept within the bounds of challenging-but-achievable in one day.
Cloud-pleasing atmospherics over Glen Nevis, from Stob Bàn (Walk 27)
A sense of wilderness
Britain is an urban island tethered to a teeming continent, its landscapes and ecology shaped in large part by human hand. If wilderness is a place untouched, then few (if any) remnants are left in Europe. But at times the hills of Scotland feel close to that ideal. However, most of the remaining areas genuinely unaffected by human activity are found only above about 700m. Elsewhere the impression of wilderness is generally false. This is an environment degraded by deforestation and managed, in effect, as a giant deer farm.
But the feeling of Scotland’s wildness remains. When confronted with the vast, the untamed, the ancient and the other, our feelings may evade neat definition; but we know them when we feel them. The Highlands and Islands are a rarity in modern Europe – a place where such experiences remain the norm; a sparsely populated area of significant size left largely uncluttered and uncultivated, influenced more by the elements than by industry.
Ironically, even the emptiness is to some extent a man-made desolation. Most of today’s deserted glens once supported subsistence communities, and although it would be tedious to romanticise the bleakness of former times we should at the very least acknowledge the brutal economics that bled the uplands of their people during the Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries. Born of past injustice it may have been, but its emptiness is now the area’s unique selling point, making it an exceptional resource for wilderness tourism and a boon to us all in an overused world.
Getting around
Public transport in the Highlands is patchy – in some parts reasonable, but elsewhere limited or non-existent. Hubs such as Fort William and Kyle of Lochalsh are linked to the cities of Scotland’s south and east by rail or long-distance bus route (sometimes both), making them accessible overland (given time) from places as exotic as Paris, Brussels or even London. Intermediate points along the main transport arteries are, of course, equally accessible, and those with hills on the doorstep make good bases for car-free walkers – such as Crianlarich, Glencoe or Aviemore. The ferry ports for the western isles are Ullapool, Oban and Uig on Skye (itself served by ferry from Mallaig and road from Kyle), while Rum and the other Small Isles are reached from Mallaig. In remoter parts of Scotland buses may be few and far between, especially in the northwest. Public transport information is provided in the box at the start of each walk in this book. See also Appendix 4 for details of the main transport providers.
On some approaches it’s ‘two wheels good, two legs bad’ – Sgurr na Lapaich (Walk 15) from Glen Strathfarrar