Introduction
In Britain, the furthest you can ever get from a road is seven miles (Ruadh Stac Beag in Wester Ross, according to Ordnance Survey); but it's astonishing how you can trip over a wilderness just metres from civilisation. You turn a corner, go through some trees, and there it is!
In urban High Wycombe – not at all my choice of place to explore, but I was there on business – I decided to investigate an interesting-looking hill in the couple of hours I had to spare. Down the road into the town centre, the traffic roared past me, two abreast in either direction; but at the bottom a footpath tempted me into parkland.
I paused to admire the outdoor swimming pool, apparently built over a Roman villa, and so glimpsed two swans preening like Sirens on the top of the steps beyond. Lured to the top of the steps, I found a man-made watercourse, fringed with gorgeous trees and chock-a-block with swans and cygnets, ducks and ducklings, moorhens, coots, and a lot of other waterfowl I failed to identify. And snaking away over the Dyke were little paths into Keephill Wood, where, the moment I climbed up past the houses, I was alone in the forest like Little Red Riding Hood, (but no wolves here!)
In Dingwall, camped up with a foot injury, I went for a gentle stroll. With no idea of what lay behind the avenue of lush green giant chestnuts and sycamores roaring gently in the warm wind, I followed the path out of the campsite, along the creek, and up onto the Cromarty Firth.
The shores of the firth were ablaze with gorse and sunshine; and here there were the sharp greens of fresh foliage on the trees and bushes, too, and the banks of frothy white thorn blossom which I so loved at this time of year. The air was salt and the sand was golden here, silver out towards the sea. There were plovers and curlews, oystercatchers, razorbills, cormorants. Gulls, too, of course; and what turned out to be kittiwakes. And yet over there behind me was a mountain peak, still bearing a glistening mantle of snow despite the amazing sun we'd had.
I'm not the first person to fall in love with Ullapool, a picturesque fishing village on the western coast of Scotland. I arrived on a Bank Holiday weekend, with some kind of folk festival going on, and the air was full of music. Someone across the campsite was learning to play the tin whistle; whilst the occupant of the diminutive tent next to mine played classical guitar for a couple of hours. Outside the ceilidh hall, four teenagers rosined their bows; and the evening's opus was jigs and reels. The campsite chatter carried on through the night, amiable and unintrusive; and at some ungodly hour the ferry came clattering in from Stornaway, sirens blaring, lorries shunting, deckhands calling out, bringing a sense of adventure from the islands.
I hiked out of Ullapool on the Bank Holiday Monday, along the most breathtaking glen, where small birds sang in the fresh spring bushes, buzzards wheeled overhead, a cuckoo called from distant woodland. Over the cliffs and caves in the hillside to my left there were glimpses of far mountains, and at lunchtime I paused on the pebble beach along the shores of Loch Achall, a cluster of silver birches affording a little shade from the midday sun, their leaves gently shushing in the warm breeze.
I camped up at Loch an Daimh, just at the end of the estate track, and watched the fish jumping through the mirror of the loch, falling below the surface again in spreading rings of ripples. The sun, setting behind me, bathed the whole in golden light; but I didn't take any photos, because I thought that there would be spectacular pictures in the morning, when the sun rose over the loch. I had no way of knowing that a storm would whip up out of nowhere, just an hour or two later, and I would find myself chasing my tent barefoot down the glen as it took off in the howling gale. Nor that the dawn light would be filtered through an almost impenetrable fog, last night's tranquil sunset a half-remembered dream.
But when I blundered away through the mist the next morning, I stumbled upon a stunning little gorge, so steep and narrow that it vanished between the contour lines, even on the 1:25000 map, and was thus invisible to anyone but an explorer leaving the stalker's path that was there in print for all to follow. In the gorge, stunted little trees thrust bravely up the steep slopes between rocky outcrops, their roots carpeted in moss and ferns, and the tumbling stream which bubbled way below them fell hundreds of feet down the cliffs which were my only way back up to the map.
It was going to be another blazing day; and I sat at the top of the gorge and watched the sun burn off the mist, so that the landscape around me appeared in ghostly wraiths like pictures in the photographer's developing tank; and then I ambled on along the river falling to earth in a series of astonishing waterfalls as I pulled gently uphill beneath the northern flanks of Seana Bhraigh. And here Glen Douchary was so irresistible that I camped up at lunchtime and spent the rest of the day absorbing its magic.
The only sound was the murmur of the river. Just five miles from the nearest road, as the crow flies, and I could have been on another continent.
It doesn't cost much to follow Britain's long-distance trails out into its wildernesses if you are going on foot and camping along the way. In Scotland, and parts of Wales, wild camping is allowed, and your only expenses are food and boot-leather. In England, there are campsites the whole length of the country if you look hard enough; and while I paid as much as £16 for a night in my tent at one site, the next was just £3.
One of the things I am on the run from is the ceaseless, mindless churning of the trite, unnecessary words which are being spewed forth over our planet like toxic gases. Never mind global warming: global hot air is a far greater evil, because it threatens our very souls. My challenge is to find words that will pick their careful way through the seething flow to the empty spaces beyond, where solace can yet be found.
