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What follows is, if anything, an adventure story. Ostensibly the story of a long, long walk, it could also be filed under Autobiography, Geography, Topography, Survival Skills, Psychology, Asceticism, Meteorology and, at a pinch, Gastronomy. It is about a period of twelve weeks in the mid-1980s, about a country, Scotland, and a person, me. It is about the intertwining of these things, the weaving together of people, places and time in perhaps the simplest of all ways, that of putting one foot in front of the other: walking.
I say "adventure", but don't expect Indiana Jones or James Bond: it is not that exciting, there are no grapplings with monster snakes, no shootouts with hi-tech weaponry - and, sadly, no late-night wooings or softly-lit seductions. Neither should the reader anticipate high jinks at high altitude: no struggles to attain Himalayan summits in jetstream winds, no desperate descents from death-zone bivouacs with broken legs. Scotland is, despite occasional patriotic pomposity, a quiet, undemonstrative, subtle country, while your man here, for all that an idea can burn inside him, is a relatively humble soul. The two seem to go well together. Thus an adventure story, but a small-scale, modest adventure.
For starters, though, before whistling on the scene-shifters to prepare the main act, a little background must necessarily be painted in by way of personal detail and historical hard fact. After all, if you have taken a notion to spend twelve whole weeks in my company, you had better first come in for a cup of tea and a blether.
In the summer of 1986 I was 25 years old, single, unattached and unemployed except for various part-time and voluntary community work involvements. I was also, and had been for a number of years, an extremely keen, regular and reasonably fit hillwalker. In a nutshell, I was footloose and fancy-free.
Living in Scotland - for a number of years in Aberdeen, latterly in Glasgow - I had "grown up", in the hillwalking sense, in the great tradition of weekends and days spent in the Highlands as means of escape from nearby conurbations. Scotland is ready-made for this: for all that kailyarders and dewy-eyed romantics croon, the land boasts very little, if anything, in the way of the fabled One True Wilderness. Already I had come to recognise that even the most remote hills - Fisherfield, Ben Alder, innermost Cairngorms - could, in the course of long, near-perpetually-daylit summer's days, be climbed and returned from by anyone in possession of sturdy legs and strong lungs. Don't listen to the equipment manufacturers and guidebook Jeremiahs when they try, for the betterment of their bank accounts, to convince you otherwise. In the Scottish hills it is, as the footballers love to say, a case of win, lose or draw, you get home to your bed just the same.
Nor was I ignorant of the fact there never really had been any great wilderness. In days gone by, the glens now gleefully labelled "remote" - and consequently supposed to be somehow intrinsically attractive, virtuous even - were lived in, not just by one or two hermit-like weather-beaten ascetics, but by whole structured communities which were to be systematically and disgracefully wiped out during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Thus the taken-as-read history of the Scottish Highlands comprises a large degree of myth - although a myth deeper and more tragic than that under which modern-day coffee-tables creak and groan. That these lands, particularly those north of the Highland Line, are relatively empty and barren compared to the richness and vitality further south has only come about because people made it that way.
Yet I was no historian, only a hillgoer, and the empirical knowledge borne out of hundreds upon hundreds of ascents had made me alert to the misapprehension that things could be all too easily oversimplified. Scotland is not a soft touch for walkers, not just a Lake District, High Peak or Snowdonia on a slightly bigger scale: the climate sees to that. For all that any hill can be day-climbed in the long summer months, so even the most puny of peaks can prove unattainable on a fierce winter's day when the winds blow, the snow sheets down and the few precious hours of daylight snap shut like a knife. Anyone spending any amount of time in the Scottish hills knows this: one has to in order to survive. Not survive so much in the literal, avoiding-death sense (although the casualty figures each winter are always worth more than a cautionary glance), but in terms of evading becoming downbeaten and disillusioned by the worst the weather can throw at you.
What else did I know? At a personal level I knew that I wanted to move beyond the day trip/weekending mentality of a hill here, a hill there, then back home to the city. I wanted, at least once in my life, to devote a considerable length of time to the one thing I relished above all else: the climbing of hills. Any walks - not just those confined to the hills - can, route-wise, be divided into three main categories. Firstly comes the straight there-and-back walk, from A to B and back to A again by the same route. Then there is the circular walk, again from A to B and back to A, but returning, like the Wise Men having met King Herod, by a different route.
These two variants on a theme are, in the main, the domain of the car-based walker, who has no choice but to wend his or her way back to the dreaded box-on-wheels. But the third and intrinsically far more satisfying option, that of a linear walk, from A to B and so on to C, was what interested me. Throw off the shackles of the infernal internal combustion engine, forget about the need to return to a place labelled Home; no matter that my dream version of a linear walk was not just a matter of A-B-C, but so on to Z with half of every known alphabet in between. This was what I wanted, what I yearned for, what kept me awake at night: the sense of going somewhere.
Yet what, precisely, to do? Just as there was a long, egalitarian tradition of regular and committed hillgoing from across a wide swathe of the population, so there was also a notable history of what had come to be known as Long Walks. I wanted to do something original - not so much so to claim a "first", more to intrigue and motivate myself with the shock of the new. But most obvious Long Walks had already been successfully - and often very publicly - attempted. Sandy Cousins, the Ripley brothers and ultimately Hamish Brown with their Munros-in-one-go expeditions - followed by copy-cat variations by the Kathy Murgatroyds and George Keepings of this world. So that was out. Also off the slate was the mega-bag of Munros and Corbetts together: this had recently been achieved by Craig Caldwell. I was reasonably competent in winter conditions - as anyone who learned their trade in the Cairngorms had to be, lest they find themselves relegated to a mere four-months-per-year access to the bigger hills. But even here, Martin Moran had, only recently, swept away what appeared to be the main prize: that of all 270-odd Munros in a single winter season.
I could, of course, opt out of structured walks altogether and go for what the old-timers call a stravaig. Yet although two or three months of where-the-mood-took-me wandering sounded pleasurable enough, idyllic even, I feared the lack of a structure would, at best, make me lazy and slipshod, at worst see me losing touch with my motivations completely and quickly giving up. No, what was needed was a way of pushing myself to the limits of what I could do, and a relatively rigid framework was hence a necessary evil.
Quite how the idea finally arose I cannot now remember, just that one day I was still lost in a directionless mist, the next I had an entire itinerary well on the way to completion. From slouching in front of the TV watching the test match, my living room became a frantic flurry of maps and note-covered scraps of paper. I suddenly knew what I wanted to do, and the idea came complete and unabridged, needing only to be transferred first to the world of maps, paper and planning, then to that of the hills themselves. The gestation period was brief.
It was the Munro idea that was wrong: why hadn't I perceived this earlier? My idea for a Long Walk would move away from the artificial structure of a munro opus towards what could be termed a more "natural" route. One which, no matter whether the heights of the hills were denoted in feet, metres or pieces of eight, would always stay the same. A route where size didn't come into it at all, having been completely written out of the equation at the outset. The name of such a route? The watershed.
Turning briefly to semantics, the word watershed has two connected, if subtly different, meanings. The first is that of a dividing-line between separate river systems - ie river systems which at no point intermingle. The second sees a watershed as the river basin itself: the catchment area demarcated by a line of hills. This latter interpretation occurs mainly in American English, where, for instance, the great north-south spine of the USA, the Rockies, is colloquially known as the Great Divide, with the drainage areas east and west of the high ridges regarded as the watersheds.
That this isn't the situation in Britain is evinced by taking note of the word's most common usage in the general ebb and flow of the language - as metaphor. Sportsmen and women speak of a watershed in careers, politicians of a watershed in negotiations, Mary Whitehouse of the 9 o'clock TV watershed; the image is of a dividing-line, a significant something needing to be crossed in progressing from A to B.
Nor is the comparison with America as facetious as it sounds. The Land of the Free is, like Britain, longitudinal in shape - ie with east and west coastlines predominant. Hence the main watershed runs, in a cartographical sense, vertically. The comparison can even be extended to the fact that both nations have their main watersheds disproportionately near the western seaboard. Just as water running east off the southern Rockies meanders tortuously towards the Mississippi Delta and the distant Atlantic, so water draining east from, say, Sgurr na Ciche in Knoydart takes a near eternity to find its way to the Inversnechtie Delta and the Moray Firth. Conversely, both American and British watersheds have, in places, astonishingly short western drainages - that from Sgurr na Ciche to Loch Nevis being scarcely three miles.
Beginning to get the idea? You will of course appreciate there are, within any piece of land, innumerable smaller watersheds: any glen, any valley will divide and rule its own localised water table, even if only for a short time. For example, the familiar watershed running through the Cairngorms, separating the major rivers of Dee and Spey, is in turn subdivided by smaller watersheds, keeping apart rivers such as Lui and Derry, Einich and Feshie, which only later feed into their parent flows. Hence whilst the summit ridge or plateau of any given hill is usually home to a simple two-way-split of a watershed - eg Ben Lomond walls off Clyde (in the shape of Loch Lomond) from Forth (via the Loch Ard feeders) - the overall picture for any given area is much more complicated, such that a map of Scotland showing each and every watershed, no matter how large or small, would resemble one of those gruesome diagrams in Gray's Anatomy: a body stripped of skin to reveal the blood supply, the vena cava branching into main veins supplying the extremities, with these in turn endlessly subdividing down to capillary level.
Were Scotland a more rounded shape of country - eg a Germany or a Spain - not only would we be much better at football, but our watershed map would have no clear shape to it, no feeling of direction, of thrust. But we are a linear land, with a consequently linear main watershed, and to someone such as myself, with an eye for map-reading and an urge to take up my bed and walk, that linearity, once perceived, was always going to prove irresistible.
The idea having come to me sometime in the summer of 1986, the first priority was for the route to be meticulously mapped. That this proved easier than expected was primarily down to the very hilly - and therefore well-defined - nature of the terrain itself. Only where the watershed crossed the Central Belt - the relatively low-lying ground between Glasgow and Edinburgh - was there any cartographical confusion, with trickles of burns and even artificially-cut drainage channels sometimes seeming to do the impossible by flowing both ways simultaneously. It was this kind of difficulty - thankfully short-lived and localised in Scotland - which finally disabused me of any lingering notion to walk not just the main watershed of Scotland, but that of Britain as a whole. This existed, at least in theory - England being every bit as linear as its northern neighbour. But while the dripping-and-tripe end of the English watershed would be well enough defined (a traipse along the Pennines, for instance), the thought of what awaited below Sheffield was enough to make even the most hardened walker blanch. Dodging bicycles on the campus of Keele University, meandering endlessly through the Acacia Avenues and Laburnum Crescents of Birmingham housing estates, being blown sky-high by land mines on Wiltshire firing ranges... Plus the fact of England being the least enlightened country in Europe when it came to freedom of access and wild camping. Plus the entire route being more than doubled in length. No thank you!
Mapping the Scottish watershed proved a learning experience in itself. As my 1:50000 OS maps steadily gained a squiggly red line which felt-tipped its way northward from the Border, I was quickly surprised to note just how many of the country's major hills were bang on the dividing-line. Cairngorms were too far east, of course, just as the Nevis-Leven-Coe complex occupied a western niche all of its own. But many of the main Borders hills straddled the route, as did Ben Lomond, Cruach Ardrain, Beinns Laoigh and Achallader, the entire Blackmount horseshoe, Ben Alder, the high tops immediately east of Creag Meagaidh, the Loch Lochy group, the eastern end of Knoydart's Rough Bounds, then a grand tour of much that was good in the big western glens: over half the South Cluanie Ridge, Beinn Fhada, Ceathreamhnan, Bidein a'Choire Sheasgaich, and on into the north via a whole batch of Fannaichs, some Deargs and Conival, before finishing with a final flourish: Foinaven to Cape Wrath.
Any lingering doubts as to the seriousness of what was being undertaken were dispelled by these maps. They were tangible reminders that I didn't want a stroll of a walk, and the watershed most certainly wasn't going to provide one. For all my Munrophobia, the route was to include almost fifty of the damn things, backed-up by twenty-five Corbetts and a whole host of lesser peaks
Yet I wouldn't have had it any other way, and this mapping process was crucial in emphasising the eclectic nature of the watershed. The variation in the size of watershed hills - from 1100m giants such as Ben Alder right down to tiny 100m bumps unable even to boast a name on the map - simply didn't matter. There was something pleasingly egalitarian about it all, something integral. The little hills weren't meaningless distractions between the bigger ones, nor vice versa. And when the much-heralded Greenhouse Effect raises the sea-level a metre or two, a number of marginal Munros will necessarily be chalked off that list (including my own route's borderline three thousand footer, Sgurr nan Ceannaichean). But the sea-level could rise up to our necks and beyond for all that the watershed would remain unchanged. Only the heights of the hills would alter, not the line itself. The route was the route was the route. It was, to misquote Forster, a case of Only Connect.
The planning of these connections was to occupy much of my spare time during the winter of 1986/87 - although to view time devoted to the watershed as spare was becoming a bit of a joke: it was the rest of my life which felt dispensable, irrelevant. The watershed was what really mattered.
By breaking down the route into manageable portions - hill-bytes, perhaps? - I gradually gleaned that the whole shebang was to be some 800 miles in length, involving the best part of 80,000m of ascent and occupying roughly twelve weeks. I planned, in the main, to walk alone, but geared the logistics around rendezvous with friends and fellow walkers every weekend. This would allow for replenishment of supplies - both fresh food and clean clothes (long-distance walking is a smelly business) - and give something to look forward to. Three months is a long time, especially when spent mainly in self-imposed solitary confinement, and the need to keep morale high would be crucial. Recognising this in advance, I noted every third weekend conveniently brought a youth hostel, where several consecutive nights could be spent in relative comfort. Already - rightly as it transpired - I was doubting whether more than three weeks could be allowed to pass without some form of battery-recharging.
Once the route had been established, other factors could be firmed-up. What to do in terms of accommodation? was largely determined, not by the river flow of the watershed, but by the cash flow of my bank account. I was skint, overdrawn already, and must perforce use tents and bothies as much as possible. This, however, suited me fine, and was of course necessary given I would often as not be voluntarily benighted far from roads and houses. On the rare occasions when hostels or - luxury of luxuries - bed-and-breakfasts coincided with my route, they could just about be afforded. But I had already spent the best part of a year of my life "under canvas" (or whatever has become its pre-stretched nylon equivalent), and knew I would relish the freedom, mobility and privacy this allowed.
A corollary to this was the question of where exactly to spend my nights, location-wise. In attempting to explain the watershed to bemused friends, I had taken to using the neat description of it being the only route through Scotland not to involve crossing a river. Technically true (although various low-lying bogs en route were to prove little drier than rivers themselves, while there was at least one lochan which flowed both ways), this begged the important question of how to obtain water for drinking and cooking. Scotland might be one of the wettest lands under the all-too-rarely-seen sun, yet I was choosing the driest of all lines through it. Fortunately this merged neatly with another concern - the establishment of a routine not too dissimilar to that of standard hill days. I decided, unless the weather was so stunningly good as to justify camping high, to descend slightly off-route each night, thus resolving all these difficulties in a oner. That I was already learning to treat the walk as work was shown by this desire to clock-off and, however nominally, go home each night.
Having until now implied there to be no possible variation in the line of the watershed, it must be conceded I did have a couple of route-finding decisions to make in advance of setting off. Scotland is, as already suggested, primarily a country of two coastlines - so much so that the common perception of national character is itself split between garrulous westcoasters and more taciturn, gaunt types from the east. Yet Scotland also boasts a dim and distant north coast, and this comes into play at the top end of the watershed. I was forced to choose between one end of my walk being Cape Wrath at the northwestern tip, or Duncansby Head, its sibling in the far northeast. The split - a kind of geological Georgemas Junction - occurred so far up in Sutherland's Reay Forest, so near the northwestern end of things, that my choice was never really in doubt: the Caithness diversion would involve some fifty miles more. Not only that, while both variations reached the sea at suitably impressive sea cliffs, the Cape Wrath option kept up its hill-character all the way, whereas the John o' Groats branch not only ran the risk of encountering coachloads of camera-clicking tourists and tacky shops selling tea-towels and scottie-dog biscuit tins, it would also have taken me through the bogs and flatlands of the Flow Country. Fine though this would have been from a scenic and ornithological standpoint, the prospect of several days' bog-trotting through the domicile of the pied shankwarbler didn't exactly fill me with glee. Tom Weir I was not. The Capes of Wrath awaited.
Similarly, I had to decide whether to go north-south or south-north. This, a crucially important decision, vexed me somewhat. I quite fancied the idea of starting in relatively familiar country - and, ironically, had climbed a good deal more hills in the far north than the much more adjacent Borders. But common-sense eventually prevailed: for one thing, the rolling greenhills of Roxburghshire would provide a more palatable entr‚e to fitness than would grey Sutherland gneiss-heaps. For another, winter, like the trains, never ran on time these days, and the slightest delay could see me slogging up big, steep, northern hills with a fifty-pound sack through impossibly deep snows. Even before the turn of the year I had irreversibly opted to start my adventure in an obscure valley on the Union Boundary by the name of Hobb's Flow.
The question of what time of year to walk also needed finalised. This was, thankfully, less difficult. Winter was out of the question, for me at least. Summer was too moist and midgy, autumn ran the gauntlet of the stalking season and encountered the nemesis of ever-shortening days. Spring shouted out to be walked through: improving weather, beckoning daylight, the fresh vitality of all things new. Spring it would be.
The early months of 1987 flew past in a blur, tempus fugiting furiously. Lightweight equipment was bought, manufacturers sooked up to (almost invariably without success) for freebies or discounts, various horrible-tasting freeze-dried foods were weighed, both literally and gastronomically, against other horrible-tasting freeze-dried foods. All sorts of items were tested, modified, scrounged or borrowed. All manner of things were done which normally fill countless appendices of books such as these, but which will, for the sake of the reader's sanity, be skipped over here.
A brief diversion occurred in the form of panic on noticing a previously unread reference to the watershed in Moran's book The Munros in Winter. He cited some companion having mooted the possibilities of the all-Britain route, only to be discouraged, as had I, by the prospect of canal towpaths through the Potteries and the like. He never seemed to have considered the Scotland-only option, and a brief check elsewhere assured me the watershed was still virgin territory, the walker's equivalent of a first ascent. Not that I really minded: even had the route been trod a myriad times, it was still going to be uniquely different for each and every person making the attempt.
Simultaneous with the route-planning, discussions were taking place with various of Glasgow's charitable bodies, such that sponsorship forms were eventually drawn up to enable each mile of the watershed to raise a little money for an Oxfam agricultural project in Nicaragua. I wasn't all that bothered about this, the walk being far too personal an experience to be sidetracked into serious fund-raising (or maybe I was just becoming too single-mindedly selfish), but it would scarcely impinge on the organisation of the thing to set up this one small sideshow. And anyway, the cause was good.
I was even more ambivalent about genuine publicity, only agreeing to the slightly melodramatic step of issuing a press release to raise awareness of the half-hearted fund-raising. Not that this achieved much in the end: the only things to appear in print were a snippet in The Great Outdoors and a brief photo-story in Glasgow's Evening Times. The latter was notable for the poor man's paparazzi insisting I be pictured wearing an enormous fleecy jacket which I wouldn't have dreamt of wearing on the walk itself, so that I "looked like a mountaineer". Weren't the beard and the boots enough?
Suddenly it was early April and almost time. Bidding temporary farewell to friends was, of course, the hardest part, although even here things were lightened by a late-in-the-day conversation with my parents. I had explained the whole concept to my mother - as unlikely a hillgoer as you could ever meet - earlier in the year, and had been somewhat surprised to hear no objections raised, no cautions expressed. Was this not the woman who once decreed I should never possess such a dangerous machine as a bicycle? Or who, in my schooldays, prevented me from captaining my school chess team one night on the grounds I had done enough gallivanting that week already? Yet now, on the eve of the biggest risk-taking venture of my entire life, silence. Strange.
The mystery was only resolved just before leaving, when in the midst of phonecall assurances that Yes, I would keep in touch, Yes, I would wrap up warm, she asked the question which had been ticking over in her mind since first hearing of the project: "There'll be a path all the way, won't there?" Yes, mother, yes.
I was ready to go.
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