Ronald Turnbull gets all canal-obsessive as he takes a look at the merits or otherwise of Scotland's newest long distance route from Fort William to Inverness.
There was a time when special-issue stamps were strictly for downmarket third-world countries. Our own august General Post Office didn't need the pocket money of eleven-year olds eager to complete the set of Men in Specs from Northern South America. And certain states felt similarly snobby about long-distance paths. Switzerland didn't have them and neither did we in Scotland.
Unna and his Rules had something to do with it. Anyone who couldn't get through the Ghru without a set of signposts shouldn't get through the Ghru at all. The marking of paths was cleverly classed as a health risk, leading the innocent into perilous places. Though, strangely, the corpses have failed to pile up on the red-and-white paintflashed Tour de Mont Blanc.
Anyway, those unenlightened wayless days are now well over. After long decades when we had the choice of the Spey Way, the West Highland Way and the Southern so-called "Upland" Way, there are now ways all over the place. Two new ones appeared last month.
The Rob Roy Way (www.robroyway.com), which arrived mid-May, I know nothing of. On the map it looks like forest roads and tarmac but maybe it's better than it looks.
The Great Glen Way ( www.greatglenway.com), though, which opened at the end of April - just how great is this? On the map it's a striking natural line and a true coast-to-coast. Already Harvey Maps (www.harveymaps.co.uk) have shifted 2,000 copies of the route-map. But is this just another triumph of image over scenery? I turned for an opinion to one of the first to walk this new route in its entirety. The poet Coleridge came this way in August of 1803.
The trip started in an open coach but Coleridge got bored of listening to Wordsworth wittering on about his illnesses when he, Coleridge, had so much more interesting illnesses of his own. He took the walk along the Forts to Inverness as detox therapy, withdrawing from all drugs except a little bit of ether and quite a lot of malt whisky (the illicit Glenlivet was pretty big in 1803). Absence of opium induced diarrhoea and nightmares and fits of weeping. In this debilitated state, the GG Way took him four whole days. His shoes fell apart at Fort William and off at Fort Augustus, where he was taken for a spy and imprisoned. His language skills were up to the occasion by the end of the evening he'd talked his way out of gaol and into dinner with the Governor.
So what did he think of his walk? "The intervals between fine things in Scotland are very dreary, whereas in Cumberland and Westmoreland, there is a cabinet of beauties. Loch Lochy very like the narrowest, and barest parts of Ullswater, a lake, in short, among bleak hills." One bit he did admire was the Falls of Foyars - "the plumage of the fall, the puffs of smoke in every direction from the bed of plumy foam at the bottom...it is a glorious scene." It's just as well the poet told us, the Falls of Foyars are now inside the pipes of the Hydro Board.
I get these canal compulsions myself from time to time, usually in the course of walks from Knoydart or Glenelg. And after several stiff days of bog myrtle and pathless Corbetts, three miles of towpath are pleasantly restful. The broombush and the hawthorn are scenting the air and behind the broombush is a bit of Ben Nevis. A sailboat passes by and a couple of ducks are plittering among the rushes. The fourth mile of towpath is slightly less fun. By the sixth mile I'm desperate to feel my feet swishing through the crisp wrappers and discarded Nevisport bags of Fort William.
But the Great Glen Way isn't all towpaths. There's a whole lot of forest road and an old railway behind Loch Lochy. And there's a place high up on the moors called Abriachan. My sister stayed in Abriachan, in what had been the highest crofted croft in Scotland. Indeed I've walked what was to be Great Glen Way from there to Drumnadrochit in my own drug deprived haze, desperate for a fix of nicotine and came back over the moors with a tin of Golden Virginia so baked and aged that once lit it flamed like dry bracken.
In Abriachan, they used to plant rowan along the eastern edge of their ground to protect them from the great beast himself, the mage Aleister Crowley, who lived at Boleskin on the opposite side of the loch. As he compiled his grimoires, the room darkened so that candles were lit even at midday and the lodgkeeper went mad. Crowley has his place in a webpage devoted to Scottish mountaineering; in his application to join the SMC he claimed to have ascended Ben Venue. However, his main exploits were elsewhere - on the Nape's Needle of England (a variant route graded Diff) and on Kanchenjunga (in 1905 he reached 6,000m and lost several members of the expedition in an avalanche) - oh and he did go up the White Cliffs of Dover with an iceaxe.
Abriachan also has been my closest encounter with the other monster of Loch Ness. No, I didn't meet Nessie at the 400m contour among the peat. I didn't even meet a person who'd met Nessie. But Kathleen Stewart, the postmistress of Abriachan, told me that she'd met someone who'd just that minute seen the monster - and they still had the look of amazement on their face...
When you meet an American in Oban Youth Hostel, they're just off up the A82 to look at the Monster. It does seem a bit of a shame, when there are so many fine things to be seen in Scotland that actually do exist, to devote such effort to one that doesn't... Not to mention Loch Ness in fact being roughly Scotland's 107th most beautiful loch. Offhand, I can't think of a Scottish loch (apart from sprucegirt Loch Grannoch of Galloway) that isn't either a reservoir or else at least slightly prettier than Loch Ness.
After not seeing the Loch Ness Monster, those folk from the youth hostel are going to drive for three hours up the A9 to John o' Groats to look at a silly signpost. There's something to be said for this itinerary. The more people we can squeeze into the layby with the bagpiper on Rannoch Moor, the fewer there'll be in Coire Mhic Fhearchair. Send everybody to Iona on CalMac's floating skip and let them drive over the sea to Skye on the Skye Bridge. This keeps them away from the bits of Scotland that really are worth going to. Places like the Nevis Gorge, Dunnottar Castle, or Section 10A of Munro's Tables; Upper Glen Feshie and the Broughton Heights; Carsaig Bay, the Galloway Hills and the villages of Fife. That bothy between the hills and the sea where Bonnie Prince Charlie got started on his whisky habit and whose grid reference, you, harmless reader, are not worthy of being imparted.
Is this attitude somewhat dog in a manger? Or the dog in a'Mhaingir - a'Mhaingir being a rather nice stony col between Sgurr Mor and Gairich, great little camp site actually...
But if people think it's fun to go and look at a non-existent monster, who am I to say it's not? And then, what harm in building them a nice viewing platform to not see it from? Then let them converge on the visitor centre (meanwhile you and me are enjoying the visitor periphery). At the visitor centre they can watch a video of history invented by the tourist board, listen to some piped bagpiping and see what the country is really like by buying one of Colin Baxter's calendars. They've probably come in August anyway, the season of rainfall and the midge, of the caravan-clogged single-track road, of bracken and angry landowners.
Scotland's a tough country and we who walk here must take on the tough task of enjoying the stony towpath at 60m above sea-level, the wild Scottish scene of the Sitka Spruce all the way up to Abriachan. We shall walk the abandoned railway lines of Perthshire while our inflamed brains range far into the mountains being massacred with a broadsword by a red-headed maniac of Clan Macgregor. For what human organ expands to six times its normal size when stimulated? The answer is the pupil of the eye but also the imagination. If you thought of a third answer, sorry, but you're hopelessly over-optimistic. Indeed, you're just the sort of person who'll appreciate the Great Glen Way - and mind and look for out for that Loch Ness Monster!
Ronald Turnbull
20/6/2002
Dave Hewitt is on holiday.
