Walking the Watershed

Acknowledgements

From first conceiving the idea to walk the watershed, to finally completing this manuscript, has taken seven-and-a-half years. It is therefore hardly surprising that large dollops of help and support need acknowledged.

Several people involved in the walk have hardly been seen or heard from since. A good few more who didn't know me when I had a rucksack on my back became firm friends in later years when a computer keyboard was rarely far from my fingertips. Many have been on hand throughout. Hopefully the following list will serve to reinforce the extent to which I was merely the front end of a very large operation.

But before rattling through the full supporting cast, special mention must be made of several star performers.

It was vital, both to safety and efficiency, that logistics were centralised - and Julia and John Bowditch operated a faultless base camp during the walk. No arrangements ever fell through, nothing ever went astray - plus of course they displayed utmost devotion by uncomplainingly washing my putrid socks.

If Julia and John undertook a marathon task, Sarah Craig and Michael Wright twice went the second mile. In donating, unprompted, a shiny new pair of lightweight leather boots, they prevented the walk from an early demise amid squelching bogs and blisters. Then, by offering long-term access to their house and computer, they smoothed the manuscript's transition from scribbled notebooks to hugely overwritten first draft.

Short sections of the book were written in two other locations. Chapter One started in a Sconser cottage rented by my sister Kath and her then fianc‚, now husband, Geoff Snape. Most of Chapter Three was written in a cottage at Clochan, near Buckie, owned by Susan and Angus Turner, with beautiful, inspiring views across the Moray Firth to snowy Caithness peaks.

Especial thanks are of course due to Chris Tyler, whose illustrations and maps add so much to the basic text. And to Rachel and Craig Smillie - who, quite apart from managing to feature, one each, at either end of the walk, also wrote the two ceilidh tunes at the very end of this book.

And then there were...

Felix Aitken, Elspeth Alexander, Kevin Campbell, Mary Cox, Lucy Craig, Alan Dawson, Andy Dempster, Eildon Dyer, Michelle and Jerry Eve, Jim Faichney, Catriona and Angus Gray, Cwti Green, John Heaney, Betsy and Derrik Hewitt, Maggie and John Hill, Irene and Calum Hind, Mags Hunter, Ray Kelly, Margaret and Stephen Lee, Fiona and Malcolm Lindsay, Frank McHugh, Lorraine McIntosh, Lynsey and John McIntosh, Psycho Jack McKibben, Rev David McLachlan and all at Gorbals Church, Little Dave McLaren, Duncan Merrilees, Davy Milligan, Ian Milligan, Eileen O'Donnell, Richard Perry, Linda Small, Janet Stewart, Kenny Symon, Bridget Tanner, Dr Brian Thomson, Marlyn and Ian Turbitt, Perkin Warbeck, Big Steve Young, Grolsch and Bert.

Thanks are also due to the following for important textual comments on the manuscript: Tom Atkinson, Hamish Brown, Livia Gollancz, Grant Hutchison, Elsie Luke and Andy Prospect Mayhew.

Acknowledgements to Hodder & Stoughton and International Music Publications, for permission to quote, respectively, from Peter Boardman's Sacred Summits and The Blue Nile's Heatwave.

The Aultguish Inn and the Oykel Bridge Hotel kindly retained parcels of food and clothes for collection during the walk. Thanks also to Tommy and all at Clydeside Press, and to the staff of the History and Topography Department of Glasgow's Mitchell Library.

After reading pp178-181, anyone interested in the Elizabeth Stenhouse Memorial (Scottish Charity No. SC 020328), should write to DVA, Kandahar House, 71 Meadowside, Dundee DD1 1EN.

A good many of this myriad throng make appearances in the pages which follow. I only hope that any helpers who do not, and who have similarly been omitted here, will forgive me. As they say in Glasgow, Thank youse all.