Pedestrian Prose

The Map

To get updates by email, use the subscribe box on the left. There's an RSS feed link there too.

This is a google map which will show:

• where I actually am
• where I ought to be
• the beds or bogs in which I would be sleeping if only I was where I ought to be
• blog posts with (possibly literally) lame justifications for why I'm not where I ought to be
• pictures of the blisters which I go on about at inordinate length in the blog posts.

Much as I hope to be, it's centred on where I currently am. The difference is that you can drag it around, and zoom in and out using the controls on the top left.

If you start clicking on links, it'll work better if you click here first rather than click on the map from this page.

P.S. From My Sofa (Edinburgh)

(Photo from Clovelly, 8th April, the hardest day.)

Last and First Man (Duncansby Head)

Paths, routes, tracks and trails.  Unclassified, minor, B, A, forestry and access roads.  Green lanes and holloways.  Bridleways, highways and byways.  Alleys, streets, and lanes.  Paths much-used, paths I keep alive by walking them, virgin paths I make as I walk where few now walk.

All roads lead to roam.

And so we end where we began, at one end of the country.  Me, the sea, the land. 

I turned to Ewa, and said "That's that.  Fancy going for a walk?".  So we did, to John O'Groats.  She knew I was coming and she'd baked me a cake.

I've done my End-to-End.  But the Ends do not justify the meanings, it's what's in between.  I'm still learning how to walk, but Stephen Graham described it in The Gentle Art Of Tramping:

The virtue to be envied in tramping is that of being able to live by the way. In that indeed does the gentle art of tramping consist. If you do not live by the way, there is nothing gentle about it. It is then a stunt, a something done to make a dull person ornamental. I listen with pained reluctance to those who claim to have walked forty or fifty miles a day. But it is a pleasure to meet the man who has learned the art of going slowly, the man who disdained not to linger in the happy morning hours, to listen, to watch, to exist. Life is like a road; you hurry, and the end of it is grave. There is no grand crescendo from hour to hour, day to day, year to year; life's quality is in moments, not in distance run.

Fallen trees are to be sat on, laddered trees to climb, flowers to be picked, nests to be looked into, song-birds to hear, falcons to be watched. The river invites you to strip. You sit under the cascade in the noontide; you climb into caves to cool and dry. The green roof of the mole's track is to be followed till you find the gentleman in velvet in his home. The sound of the tapping of the wood-pecker shall guide you to the loose-barked tree where with watchful eye a bird of beauty is hunting the unmannerly woodlouse. You shall approach gently the deer who, in a group, wait for you with startled eyes. They run from the crashing and speedy - they can be won by the gentle. Wild nature is not so wild as we think, or we are wilder - it is not so far from us, and we are nearer.

Nature unfolds herself slowly like a snail if you are still in front of her. You cannot know what you are walking over till you cease walking. The lizard which has eyed you furtively from under a stone comes forth and squeaks to you - you make friends with him, in fact. And as you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.

Just In (Keiss)

The trouble is, it's pronounced to rhyme with "geese".  So much for carefully prepared puns. 

Today I finally saw the ocean, which I left behind at Barnstaple.  How come it got here quicker than I did?

Before that, though, I crossed the Moss of Killiminster.  It's a nice word, isn't it, "moss"?  It conjures up a soft, green carpet, a relaxing place to lie down in the sun for a while.

It means "bog".

Because the weather has mercifully been so dry, I've got quite blase about bogs.  Sure, they're a bit damp, but there's usually a way round the worst bits.  I've got quite accustomed, over the miles, to judging the wetness of the ground from the vegetation.  How hard can it be?  Ok, how soft can it be?

In retrospect, alarm bells should have been rung by my book's use of the phrase "spectacularly soggy".  Or the suggestion that, even before you get to the bog, you cross a stream "with a flying leap".  Or the fact it's close to a place called Mireland.

Soggy.  Oh yes.  Very much so.

I wobbled precariously from tussock to tussock.  I prodded tentatively with my walking poles at bits of ground that didn't seem that appealing, but were my best option since ground I was on was rapidly sinking into the mire, which by now was largely indistinguishable from the inside of my boots.  I heaped diversion on diversion, and to make sure I didn't get too far from the rickety footbridge I was aiming for, which in my view should have soared in a single glorious span over the whole blasted thing, I occasionally checked my GPS.

After a while, the GPS "On" switch fell off.  Into the bog.

In the end I scaled the hill in the middle to get my bearings.  A mighty summit, this, all of 19 metres above sea level.

Eventually I found my way to the footbridge, the precariousness of which would have caused me some alarm if I hadn't been so glad to get there, and from then on things firmed up.

Never have my feet been happier to be safely on tarmac.

Blowing A Gael and Didgeridoo Gatepost (River Thurso)

Last night I camped in Dail Righe, the King's Field. I wonder if that's where the name Dalry comes from?

I hope for breezy evenings, to keep the midges off. I clearly hoped a bit too hard, as it was so windy I had to remonstrate out loud with my tent to remind it that it wasn't a kite. I'd finally got it pinned down when one of the straps holding a crucial guy rope tore out. I ingeniously used my walking poles as interior bracing struts, but it's a good thing that was my last night of camping.

As I approached the gatepost in the picture this morning I heard low moaning noises. I was all set to greet a fellow walker with "Don't worry, it's only a tent" when I realised it was the wind, playing the slot near the top like an instrument. The wild lands bidding me a mournful farewell.

Today I Walked A Snickers (Kinbrace)

I preferred it when they were called Marathons.

The Crask Inn was just lovely. Mike, the owner, was a shepherd and stockman for 20 years, and bought it primarily because it came with quite a lot of land, so he can grow vegetables, and have sheep and cattle. This means that he runs the hotel with an endearing absent-mindedness, and when it's quiet he pops down to do some weeding. He's a walker, and has a touching faith that anyone who walks from Land's End must be nice.

Today was the longest day of the walk. I left behind the hill country, passed my last Munro and bealach, and walked through the hills of the Flow Country to Kinbrace, which has a railway station. I'm camped on the wrong side of the tracks.

The Empty Land (Crask Inn)

I'm sitting in one relatively dry bit of bog. The Crask Inn, where I'm heading today, is a white speck off in the distance. It's been a white speck for quite a while, and it's not getting much less distant. My eye is drawn to it because there's little else.

When I booked the place, the woman asked me where I was walking from, and said "You'll be coming through some very empty land".

It's a good phrase.

There are things here - grass, moss, heather, frogs, various birds, lots of insects. But it's not exactly Piccadilly Circus.

The Difference Between Walking In The Highlands And The Cotswolds (Overscaig)

In the Cotswolds and other such places in the soft underbelly of Britain you use paths which used to be roads to get between places. In the Highlands you use what used to be paths which used to be tracks that never got made into roads to get between what used to be places and aren't any more. How many walkers does it take to keep a path alive, I wonder? More than these get.

I'm at the Overscaig Hotel, lowering the tone and sorting through the last food parcel. Can I make it to the coast on candy cigarettes?

Hallucinating Cafes (Corrie Hallie)

When I'm trudging along, and it's hard going, I pass the time by imagining there's a cafe just over the hill. As I came down from the hills to cross a road, I knew there was a craft centre nearby, and I'd persuaded myself it would do coffee for me before I headed, inevitably, back up.

And the nice woman originally from El Salvador has just made me a cafetiere, and a few pieces of shortbread. She's also just refused to serve tea to two people in a car - she only does it for walkers, because she doesn't want to compete with the place a few miles down the road. She used not to charge, but that freaked people out, so now she takes donations to feed the red squirrels.

After the mild exertions of the days before Kinlochewe (for the Americans reading, this is English understatement) my body seems to have stepped up a gear. So, clearly, have my hallucinations.

Congratulations, You Have Reached Civilisation (Kinlochewe)

I was hoping for the opposite of the pictured sign, something like "There are more people than deer, beds, tomatoes and lattes. Enjoy your stay."

As you sit in a vast valley, with a river snaking down the centre, hearing the occasional rock disturbed by the red deer moving up high, surrounded on all sides by soaring hills stark against the decidedly un-Scottish blue sky, and admire the beauty of the bealach only slightly lower than the hills around it you can almost, for a moment, forget that you have to climb over it.

I simply do not have words for how gruelling this is.

My Map For Heading North (Fort William)

Or possibly east. Wish me luck.