Two ridges of heather and grass rose up on either side of a narrow lake, like weathered hands scooping a drink of water. The blue sky was furrowed with clouds as bright as the patches of snow on the mountains in the distance. A gravel beach, wide enough for a few tents, etched a parenthesis in the distance.
It was my first day out on a walk across Scotland, and I’d stumbled upon one of the most beautiful camping spots I’d ever seen. As I pitched the tent and made dinner, the light fading with arctic slowness, I kept hoping somebody would arrive to share the place with me. But nobody did. It was all mine, for better or worse.
That’s how it was for much of the next 13 days. Backpacking across Scotland, if you go alone, as I did, is an exercise in beauty, solitude and expectancy.
I made this trip in May as part of an annual event called the Great Outdoors Challenge. Named for the British outdoor magazine that sponsors it and organized by a small army of volunteers, the Challenge helps about 300 people traverse the country, from west to east. The hikers (or “Challengers,” as they call themselves) don’t all take the same route, or even a few established ones. There are no equivalents of defined routes to follow like the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail. Instead, they custom-build routes from local hiking trails, farm and forest roads, ATV tracks, military roads built in the 18th century, and drovers’ and hunters’ trails that are even older.
Everyone leaves from one of 13 designated starting places on the west coast and finishes 13 or 14 days later on the east, traditionally by wading into the North Sea. They then make their way to Montrose, a seaside town where a celebratory banquet is held in a hotel.
You have to apply, pay a small fee and convince the organizers you’re fit before you’re accepted into the Challenge. The chief advantage of participation is the advice provided by a dozen veteran hikers, who review and approve every route — more than 200 different ones this year. These experts tell you which footbridges have been washed away, what streams are too dangerous to ford after heavy rains, where the good camping spots are, what sights not to miss.
My route was about 200 miles long. Even though it took me to a B&B or hostel about every third night, I was mostly on a backpacking trip — and a long one. I had to carry what I needed on my back and be prepared for anything, including snow.
There are easier ways to hike in Scotland. The Challenge is simply an extreme version of what is Scotland’s national pastime: “hillwalking.” The country’s Outdoor Access Code allows people to walk and pitch tents on public and private land. (There are a few exceptions, such as the British royal family’s Balmoral Estate.) All a walker has to do is stay away from crop fields, animals and buildings.
I walked 10 to 17 miles a day, with each day’s uphill sections averaging about 2,000 vertical feet. It took a lot of planning and was hard enough that I took an unscheduled rest day halfway through. But the payoff was huge. There aren’t a lot of places where you can walk sea to sea across a country that is beautiful, exotic and English-speaking. Scotland is one.
A quiet start
I flew to Glasgow and took a train to Strathcarron, my starting point. It’s a hamlet at the end of a finger-shaped “sea loch” consisting of a hotel and two blocks of whitewashed houses.
That part of Scotland is the same latitude as southern Alaska, so only a few weeks before the summer solstice, daylight wasn’t going to be a problem. I couldn’t say the same for the 40 pounds on my back. As I headed down the road then into the hills on the first morning, I excused the weight by telling myself I had 7 pounds of electronics — I was writing a blog — as well as four days of food. Over the next two weeks, however, I learned that some people somehow made the crossing with only half what I carried.
The Highlands were deforested centuries ago, which gives them a big-sky look that rivals Montana and Wyoming. But while lack of water shapes the American West, it’s the abundance of water that has made the Highlands.
It rains a lot. Sometimes for minutes, sometimes for days. The ground can be boggy even on hillsides, as hikers taking off-trail shortcuts soon discover. There isn’t a lot of bare rock (other than ruins of cottages) because things get grown over by moss, grass and heather. The end product of all the vegetation is peat, the Highlands’ wood-substitute. Huge banks of it sometimes erode into what look like surfable waves — frozen black fronts, topped with a grassy curl.
With few trees and no jagged mountains, the Highlands are hard to get lost in. Of course, it’s different if you’re in fog or a snowstorm, but luckily the weather was clear for most of my time there. The first four days I walked down valleys and over ridges, scattering sheep, rabbits and grouse and seeing almost no one.
The emptiness lent sweetness to the moments when a person did appear on the path, offering a few minutes of conversation, an exchange of gorp or hard candy and, occasionally, hours of companionship. Hillwalking creates a fraternity even for solo walkers (which 140 of the 298 participants this year were). That, in turn, gives Challengers permission to inquire about a fellow walker’s life and to synopsize their own.
I walked through a rare patch of forest in the drizzle with a 75-year-old retired surgeon, a woman whose career had been solo gigs on Hebridean islands and other far-flung spots, filling in for doctors needing a break. I spent a morning with a woman my age — 60s — who told me about growing up in postwar England, where margarine and marmalade were rationed and her house had an outdoor privy. Nothing, however, epitomized trail society better than my day with Stevie, a 56-year-old paving contractor from a town south of Glasgow.
I’d camped on the bank of the River Findhorn. Sheep grazed in a pasture that went up a ridge to where the umber heather began. I encountered Stevie when I got to the gate to the farm road that went up and over the ridge to a river valley 15 miles away. He was changing clothes and getting ready for a strenuous climb. Muscular and taciturn, he carried a backpack half the size of mine.
I thought about waiting, but I figured he’d be a fast walker, so I told him I’d see him on the trail. For the rest of the day we played tortoise-and-hare, catching and passing each other and exchanging snippets of conversation.
When he was young, he walked with his brother and a cousin. Often it was nothing more than “a rush to get to the next town and the next bar.” As he got older he went alone, often with only a rough idea of a route. A few days before we met, he’d gone over four 3,000-foot summits in a day, stumbling into his tent after dark with just enough energy to make tea before falling asleep.
Recently, he’d started enjoying the company of others. He’d walked with two Germans for a day early in the Challenge. When we got to Aviemore, our mutual destination for the day, he hoped to rendezvous with a woman he’d met on the walk the previous year.
Nevertheless, when he wanted to go on, he did. No waiting for the American with the obese pack.
We descended into Aviemore together then went our separate ways, but I saw Stevie three days later in Ballater, my next village port-of-call. He and the woman he’d been hoping to meet were in a pub near my hostel, and he greeted me like an old friend. Which, in the strange time-dilation of the trail, I was.
A hard hike
There are few obvious dangers on a walk across Scotland. The Highlands require no technical climbing; the ground is padded like a gym mat; the spring and summer days are forgivingly long. There are no bears and only one species of poisonous snake. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t discomfort, as I found in the Cairngorms on the hardest day of my walk.
Like New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the Cairngorms aren’t terribly high, but they have harsh and changeable weather that is occasionally fatal to the ill-prepared and unlucky. At 2 in the afternoon, in the rain and with many miles under my belt that day, I headed over one of the range’s plateaus to a place called the Fords of Avon.
For four hours I climbed a stony and windy trail that got stonier and windier the higher it went. Gusts staggered me. I ended up wearing almost all the clothing I’d brought.
When I got to my planned camping spot at 7:30 it was still raining, and blowing so hard it was difficult to pitch a tent. Three or four tents were clustered around a wooden box one-third the size of a shipping container that serves as an emergency shelter for hikers and skiers. Inside, people were finishing dinner. Among them were two first-time Challengers — a 69-year-old nurse, Stella, and a 70-year-old retired professor of social work, Viv.
At some point in the evening, the conversation got around to why so many older people are eager (and able) to walk with a backpack for two weeks. Of the 298 people who started the Challenge this year, only 30 didn’t finish. The median age of participants is over 55 years, with a range from 22 to 85. The theories offered were thoughtful and observant.
“When you get old you have a kind of freedom. You stop being essential to other people’s lives.”
“In a way, you’ve got more stamina when you’re older. Or more determination and patience.”
“If you’ve gotten to a certain age, you’ve had all sorts of ups and downs. You have confidence that things will work out. That you’ll be warm and dry in the end.”
It was all true, even that day.
Eventually, walking east, the land gets less wild, less hilly, less monochromatic. Lichen-covered ruins become rare, more towns appear, and there’s no avoiding paved road some of the time. Horses and cattle join sheep in the pastures. Fields of rapeseed and a thorny bush called gorse produce yellow flowers as bright as you’ll see anywhere.
Eventually you come over a hill and see the North Sea.
As I descended the last hill to the town of Stonehaven, my route’s destination, I stopped to slip a bunch of empty food packages into a trash bin at the end of someone’s driveway. (It’s never too late to lighten the load!) A car coming up the hill stopped. I thought the driver might chastise me, but instead, he wanted to congratulate me (he’d seen other Challengers) and suggest I go to a particular fish-and-chips shop in town to celebrate. Which I did.
At my age of 63, there are a lot of things that are no longer likely or possible. I’ll probably never go up Mount Kilimanjaro or run another marathon. I won’t spend a winter crewing on boats in the Caribbean. Won’t learn to play the piano. Might learn another language, although that’s a long shot.
But I’ll tell you one thing that is possible. You can walk across Scotland and put your feet in the sea.
If you go
The 2016 Great Outdoors Challenge will be May 13-27; the deadline for applications is Oct. 31. The application is in the October issue of the Great Outdoors magazine, which is not available in the United States; digital copies can be ordered at (use the Pocketmags or iTunes option). First-time walkers must provide evidence they have sufficient backpacking experience to complete the event. It is limited to 300 participants, who are chosen by lottery from qualified applicants. Entry fee, $80.
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