Hunger, midges and the ‘vicar walk’

There are two ways to start the Cape Wrath Trail: you can catch a ferry from Fort William across to the immediately wild and remote Ardgour peninsula, or you can ease yourself in by following the Great Glen Way (a 79-mile national trail) for a couple of days, which travels along the Caledonian Canal (ie. pancake flat!) before encountering more challenging terrain. The two routes converge a few days’ north.

After much consideration during the planning stage (will people think we’re lightweights? Will we miss some of the best bits?), we opted for the Great Glen route, and just hours into day one, we are glad we did. Simply carrying 15-20kg for the best part of a working day is enough of a challenge for two inexperienced hikers.

We have to keep adjusting our rucksacks: cinching in the waist a bit more, loosening or tightening the chest strap… and we sometimes find we don’t know what to do with our hands. We catch each other doing the ‘vicar walk,’ with hands clasped at chest height. And then there’s the dance of the waterproofs: stopping to fish out our jackets and step into our trousers as the first few spots of rain appear and then becoming unbearably hot not 15 minutes later when it’s stopped and the sky has brightened.

While Morris seems to have no problem coping with seven-hour walkies,  me and Jeff are ready to call it a day when we reach the banks of the imaginatively named Loch Lochy, where the guidebook assures us we’ll find a good wild camping spot. We’ve covered 14-15 miles. We pitch our two-man tent just off the trail, crawl inside to wait out a sudden shower and fall sound asleep. It’s not even 5pm.

Come on you lazy humans, I’ve got miles left in me!

Luckily, there’s just enough light left to cook dinner by when we wake up, and time to wash up and refill our water bottles from a nearby stream, which we can hear tumbling down the hillside all night.

I wake up on day 2 feeling stiff – and ravenous. We have porridge with dried fruit and nuts and get packed up, which, despite our best intentions, takes ages again.

We’ve devised a routine that involves two-hourly stops. The morning and afternoon stops are shorter than the lunch break but we still take off our packs, sit down and dig into the snacks. Our haul includes Pepperami, Babybel cheese, salted peanuts (protein and sodium) along with mini Soreen loaves, oatcakes and Haribo Tang-Fastics (carbs). All of them become utterly delicious in our perpetually-hungry state – but are strictly rationed, as we have to carry enough food with us to last five days, which is when we’ll next encounter a shop.

It’s only just after our morning break on day 2 when we come across a moored boat on the canal called the Eagle Barge. ‘Tea, coffee, sandwiches, soup, cakes’ reads the signboard on the towpath, and – oh joy! – a little sign hangs in the window saying ‘open.’ We don’t even debate whether or not we should stop – we make a beeline for one of the tables on deck and soon we’re drinking mugs of coffee and eating doorstep sandwiches.

Up to this point, we’ve still been following the reassuring blue waymarkers for the Great Glen Way but the unexpected feast gives us enough energy to press on past Invergarry, where the CWT veers off and where we’d thought we’d be making camp.

We climb up a good track through a forest of spindly pine trees – and emerge into much more open, less peopled surroundings. Farewell, flat, gravelly trail! Hello, small, slightly boggy, undulating path. My bag – not to mention my legs – are feeling heavy by early evening and with the light fading, we search anxiously for a non-marshy spot in the long grass beside Loch Garry. Finally, we find a place to pitch beside a slightly eerie burned-out ruin of a house. As soon as we stop and start unloading our gear, we find ourselves in a cloud of midges and have to put up the tent and cook dinner wearing our midge hoods. We look like bank robbers. But after nine hours and around 20 miles of walking, we’re far too tired to contemplate a life of crime and have an(other) early night.

Author: Sam Murphy

Journalist, author, running coach and educator View all posts by Sam Murphy