FO: Shwook

Back in October when I visited the Knitting in Stitching Show at Ally Pally, I mostly behaved myself as far as purchase power was concerned and walked away only burdened by a few small skeins of Jamiesons Shetland in tow.  It seemed serendipitous: having just returned to civilization after a very long walk through Scotland (but nowhere near the Shetland Isles) and I felt the need for an after-the-trip souvenir, since the only thing that I bought in Scotland ended up being cold meds to ease miserable flu symptoms on the train ride home.   Backpacking makes you weary of every extra ounce you are schlepping.

But I love to work with Shetland, and I do love colorwork in small doses (a pullover this colorful and picky would be my personal hell).  I picked a hat pattern to go with and resolved that these five green skeins would not be sitting around in my stash for years.

Speaking of backpacking, I did want a really warm hat that would cover my ears completely.  This one fit the bill nicely: a generous slouch, with the strands of colorwork carried in back to make it extra wind-resistant.

It's cheerful in shades of chartreuse and sage, willow and ivy and eucalyptus greens.  My only complaint?  I should have done the brim doubled: folded over with a picot edge to give it extra warmth and a polished finished edge.  Just having ribbing on such a complex colorwork pattern is about as fitting as putting a Honda Civic medallion on a Rolls Royce.  

The nifty thing is that this used up very little yarn.  Meaning, if I juggle the colors a bit, I have plenty of yarn leftover for another similar hat.  

But, sigh.  My resolve of walking through the winter has somewhat failed me.  The vanity of having new boots (NEW BOOTS!) that I'm unwilling to walk through bog with yet, coupled with the tiresome gray skies and drizzle cold means I've been quite the homebody in my free time, but whipping up some fantastic things in the kitchen and furiously scheming the next few bank holiday weekends.  Meanwhile, I grow comfortingly fat on dry Manhattans and thick, hearty Lebanese lentil stews, waiting with a mixture of excitement and dread the day a large hill rears up directly in my path.

The pattern is called Shwook- it's a free pattern to celebrate Shetland Wool Week 2014, and it's still available on the website.

Fort William

 After the best night's sleep of them all, I awoke early, gave a great creaky stretch, and walked across the street to Loch Linnie.

Watching the sun come up, kissing the peaks and hills and crags as it makes its way through the sky in the early chill, and wanting coffee badly, I decided that I should probably start looking for a home here.

 After much debate over a really nice breakfast - do yourself a favor and stay at the Laurel Bank Lodge if you are ever here- we decided to forego the climbing of Ben Nevis.  I thought that I probably could do it, but I felt like if I did go up and down that hill, it would be pushing myself well beyond my comfort zone.  Climbing a mountain at the end of 100 miles was just not in the cards.  As much as I wanted to, my sense of self-preservation kicked in.    

 Instead, we decided to do some nice leisurely activities.   We were debating renting a car and making our way down to Glasgow going along the coast, but after looking at all the things to do around Fort William, we stayed put.  Or, relatively put.

 On our way to the train station, we saw a boat cruise on Loch Linnie was about to leave, so we hopped on board.

Naturally, we were the most fashion-forward of tourist.  Getting a break from the boots was like walking on air.

Amazingly, the top of Ben Nevis was clear.  We whimpered as we pulled further away from the hulking elephant that we wished to be climbing.  A clear day on the highest mountain in Scotland?  You get about three of them a year.

The day was absolute stunning.  Warm, sunny and windless and a near-glassy loch.  Linnie is a saltwater sea loch, so we got to see a salmon fishery and a mussel farm, along with countless herons, eider ducks and wigeons.    

While the salmon farm was a big, cage-and-net affair with quite the odor, the mussel farm was less intrusive.

They don't even seed the ropes, they just let nature take its course and then harvest the ropes after a couple of years.  They don't fence or net in the treasured bivalves, so there are eiders that hang out hear year-round, enjoying the free lunch as far as they can dive down.  

 We finally made our way to dry land and hopped aboard the train to Mallaig.  They have a steam train that makes the route, but we decided the pedestrian diesel train would get us there all the same, and cheaper, but I'm also known as a killjoy.

This route is a big train-spotting and train geek affair- it is reputed to be the most scenic line in the UK, and they filmed the train journey in and out of Hogworts along this line.  You totally felt like a wizard here anyway.  I tried to cast a few enchantments...

 Although taking pictures from a moving train yields less than stellar results, that seems to be what everyone was doing...it was almost compulsive.  It was really beautiful, but I was bothered by the nagging feeling that I should be out there with my boots on.

 Malliag was a great little day-tripper town and fishing port.  You can get a ferry to Skye from here, or just take the train in and see the village.  Lots of cafes and pubs and fresh seafood to be had.  We had lunch of hot drinks and fresh sea loch shrimp, which were spiny little bastards and hurt your fingers to ease open, but were the best shrimp I've ever had.

The sky was so clear, well, you could see all the way to Skye.  It was a highlight of my last Scotland trip- it's just amazingly beautiful.  See those peaks?  The gentle, conical hills of the mainland are not what you find on Skye, but jagged peaks.  They look like the Alps.  While sitting on the jetty looking out, we were tempted to make some hasty plans to extend our stay.  We frantically devised plans to stay longer, call in sick to work, eat the cost of the return train ticket, somehow get a friend let in our place in London...no, this was not the right thing to do.  We need something to get us to come back, and those peaks on Skye would be it.

 The return train trip back to Fort William was much faster, as it was all downhill.  The engine barely switched on and we had a quiet coast down through the valleys and loch-sides.

Even at the late hour, the top of Ben Nevis was still cloudless and visible.  I realized around 2pm that my feet were fine after being off them for most of the morning, and we were kicking ourselves for not undertaking the big hike on our last day in Scotland.
 

Instead, we wandered around Fort William, walking barefoot through the immaculate lawn of the cemetery, exploring the very small remains of the original fort, taking in a dram and the salt air.  

The main street becomes a parade late in the day as hikers come off the trail.  It was fun to watch the reactions of people as they saw the end of the trail- it really shows a person's soul if they are cheerful or looking dejected, or just happy that their misery is over.

 I guess I'm glad I didn't do the big Ben Nevis hike after all.  For a few hours in the afternoon, I was feeling a bit sore in my neck, and my lymph nodes were lumpy bumpy.  By nightfall, I had a nice head cold working its way out, and started with the hacking cough.  I don't know why this keeps happening, but the silver lining was that at least it waited until I was off the trail this time.  I hacked my way across the last three days of the Coast to Coast when it hit me mid-hike.  I survived, but somehow this felt worse.

The next day, we were taking a bus back to Glasgow, and a train to London from there.  What I had thought as a cold was now a flu, and I was feverish and wearing all the layers of clothes that I barely touched all week, and sipping at water and eating crackers when I could, and crunching myself up into a pathetic lump of shivering misery.  Well, the bus ride was nice- it basically followed the A84, so we got to re-live the trail in a mere 3 hours, which was a bit infuriating but a good way to remember just how long that trail really had been.  I had brought a lace shawl to knit on, and due to my lack of concentration and just general feeling of misery, nothing got done on it at all.

We stopped by the Pot Still in Glasgow, as I was told by everyone and their mothers the only answer is a dram.   They opened just as we were rolling past, so the bar was quiet, with just a few people milling around.

I loaded up on cold meds for the ride home, had a lovely chat with an eccentric local, and curled up on the crowded train back to London, where somehow a large Russian family with many small children managed to get seats in the coveted "Quiet Car".

I fear I will never encounter a bar so lovely as long as I live.  

I found this trip has inspired me to want to hike in Scotland more.  This might be the most romantic place on earth.  I will return to it always.  It's pretty much an outdoorsy wonderland, with lots of quiet corners to get lost in, and every place you stop for the night has at least a good bottle of whisky for you to wax poetic about.  While the West Highland Way was worth while, I would search far and wide for a more remote trail next time.  There's one trail that goes across Skye in a week that piques my interest.  Some of the outer islands might fit the bill.  There's plenty of trails that you would need to rough-camp in order to complete, but many of them can be strung together with campgrounds and pubs as your overnight.

I'm so happy I ended my hiking season here.  The days are getting short, and the rain has been endless recently, so there was a certain finality to this journey.

I miss it there already.

WHW Day 7: Kinlochleven to Fort William

Finally!  Our last day of hiking.  15 miles of remote highland walking in the hills to get to the rather large city of Fort William.

Ah, we did awake to the news of a "no" vote.  Scotland would be remaining as part of the UK after all.  The mood in the pub that morning was noticeably darker than it had been the night before.  It's too bad, as I showed up here with no real opinion either way, but walking around the week leading up and chatting with locals as we went, I really think the "yes" voters had an articulate and compelling argument for succession.

Was I sad to be almost done?  YES.  I felt that maybe I needed a rest day, but I could have kept going.  If I did this trail again, I would have planned on adding more days to tackle the mountains that haunted the air around me.  It was kind of frustrating that the trail stayed low and skipped all these lonely challenging hikes.  While it was a long hike (this was the longest I had ever hiked in consecutive days) it wasn't hard at all and I was itching to find a more challenging route into the next valley.  Despite the fact that I had PMS cramps and low energy, I had rounded the corner on that bit and I felt good.  This had just gotten me enthusiastic to explore more of this wonderful countryside.

The only real downers on the trail were the proximity of the highway for most of this.  You'd be having a nice jaunt and zen moment, and the roar of a tanker truck would put you back in the earthly realm.

The only other complaint I had was the garbage on the trail.  Compared to England, there was a lot of bags of trash and random pockets of beer cans and whisky bottles along the way.  In fact, the first 30 miles of the trail there was an enforced "No Camping" rule, as there had been problems with people driving in and leaving bags of trash instead of carrying out.  Almost every spot where one might be able to camp had knotted-up trash bags and rubbish scattered around.  Whatever possesses people to take the time to bag up their garbage and leave it for an eyesore for all the rest of the world to see is beyond me and it ruins it for all.  Carry it out.

The morning started with no warm up at all, and we huffed away up the first hill.

Ah, what views!

 Today, the walk was across a high-up moor surrounded by murnos.

Stonechat

There were ruined shelters that the sheep and cattle drovers would camp out.

Soon, we rounded a corner, and ended up hiking for miles across a felled forest.  How depressing!  According to my OS map, we were supposed to be in the woods for a few miles, apparently it hadn't been updated in a while.  It wasn't a comforting site: miles upon miles of bleached stumps and brush piles.

We decided to take a side trail up to Dun Deardail- the ruins of a 2000 year old fort that had been burned so hot that the rocks fused together.

Naturally, the fort was on top of a very steep hill.  I wanted that view badly, and a few hikers were sitting at the bottom of the hill, waiting for their friends to be done with the view.  

 scroll ------------------------------>>>>>>>>>

That's Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in all of the UK.  It was an enormous, hulking rock.  Bry had decided this would be tomorrow's hike...supposedly, it was an easy pony trail to the top, but a very long all-day hike.    But yes, with views like that, it's worth the hike up to Dun Deardail.

It was also the only part of the trail where I got vertigo!  The hilltop the fort was on was a sheer drop on all 4 sides, with steep steps to get to the top.

Ah, and there were some nice druids working on the stairs and trail improvements leading up to the top.  Real live druids, in the wild!

From here, the trail goes down the glen and into the suburbs of Fort William.  Not content to end our walk in such a anticlimactic urbanity, we decided to climb Cow Hill, a hill that lords over the city. We'd decided we would rather have a spiritual ending of the trail, rather than an official one.  

It ended up bring a very long, steep climb...more switchbacks than the Devil's Staircase, at at times I made progress in inches rather than feet.  It took more than an hour to climb to the top.  I thought this was a more appropriate ending to a week of walking, and I was right.  At the top, we stood by the TV tower and thought about all we had seen and all we had done, and thanked our feet for carrying us as far as they did.

scroll to see the view from the Hill of Cows-------->>

Ahh, that's much better!  Loch Linnie, the hills and glens and murnos and Ben Nevis and the city of Fort William.   A real sense of accomplishment, this was, and a sad finality as we had run out of West Highland Way.

And that, my friend, was that.

We didn't have a map of Cow Hill, but it wasn't long until we realized that we had gone up the short, steep way, and we had gone down the very long gradual way, and instead of bypassing the trail's official end, we ended up meeting up with the trail and walked the last official mile through the bustling pedestrian streets of the city to the official end, which was a bench with a bronze statue of a man rubbing his feet.  Cow Hill had added 2.5 hours onto our hike, and we were closer to 20 miles at this point day.  The other thing I didn't realize was that one of the only B&Bs I could find with a vacancy was well out of the city center, and we had another 15 minutes of walking along Loch Linnie before we could get off our feet.

We celebrated with hot showers, finishing up our bottle of Glengoyne, and walking back into Fort William with our flip-flops on for dinner and a dram.

The trail was officially 95.5 miles.  Thanks to our apps, we calculated that we did closer to 110 when all was said and done.  It was probably more...we had a few long days where our phones ran out of batteries before we were done.

We were beyond tired, but elated.  I found I was exhausted enough to not be able to hold a conversation or have patience for waiting, and the moment I was done eating, I was just wanting to be recumbent more than anything.  That last mile walk back to the inn after dinner was the longest of the trail, but how sweet sleep was that night.

WHW Day 6: Kings House to Kinlochleven

I loved waking up in our little hobbit hut and seeing this:

How fantastically eerie!  Somehow, the foggy cloudy days were so much more interesting than the warm and sunny.

I did spy some black grouse on the moors.  They nervously darted away, making all manners of squacks.

Since the cafe at the ski lodge didn't open until 9 and we wanted to be well down the trail at that late hour, we walked back to the King's House hotel and took our coffee and carbs there.  What a place: in the light of day, the waitstaff looked rough.  Hungover, scabby, bedreadlocked and bruised. We did not linger.  

Today was the day that had caused much anxiety in my gut when I was planning this whole trip: a section called the Devil's Staircase in which the road builders had to somehow get a military up and over.  Never mind that, a look at the elevation map made my heart flutter:

I was fairly certain a dramatic helicopter rescue would be needed and that I would be the laughingstock of Scotland hiking lore for eternity.

I am the queen of random bouts of vertigo when it comes to hiking in the hills.  When it strikes, I drop like a stone and get tunnel vision, completely helpless to move my limbs forward.  Knife-edge ridge walks are out of the question, as is steep scrambles.  I might be able to get up them, but going down is a story that can not be told.

Still...we saw a lot of old people on the trail in amazing shape...people in their 70's.  We saw a lot of unfit people on the trail- we passed them in the morning, and if we were being lazy, we'd pass them again after lunch.  Good for them, they looked like they were in pain a lot of the day, but the ability to keep going is really the only skill you need here.  The trail so far had been easy- aside from the one scrambley part around Loch Lommond, there was very little challenge in a navigating a wide, well-worn track.  The weather had been fantastic.   I'm pretty sure I would be fine.  Still, that gnawing worry was almost as bad as the vertigo itself.  

This to me sums up the romance associated with Scotland.  The moody dark morning, the mysterious moors, the lonely bit of trail.  It was heaven, I tell you.

Meadow Pipit

I do spend a great deal of my time stopping and observing everything around me.  If you hike with me, you will be getting quite a few short breaks.  Look at the colors of these mosses!  I don't think I've seen such vibrant colors outside maples in autumn.

A lonely croft, long abandoned, was the one sing of humanity we could see.  That and the busy A84 road cutting down the valley to Glencoe.

At the base of the Devil's Staircase, there was a car park and swarms of people were making their way up this section of trail.

Now I got the name:  It was a devil to build this thing.  It was a well-engineered bit of trail, with perfect S-curves and banked turns.  Remember, this was a military road, and getting horse and cart over a hill like this would have been a pretty big deal.

Me though?  Nah, it posed no challenge at all.  I had to stop to catch my breath a few times, but other than that, I was up and over before I even knew it.  How anticlimactic!  Devil's staircase, you can not beat me.

Helicopter rescue diverted, we headed down into the next valley to Kinlochleven.

This was the largest elevation drop of the trail- we basically lost all the elevation we had gained all week, and would end the day at sea level.

This was by far our shortest day, mileage-wise, with a little over 10 miles to do.  Ah, I've reached the point where I can think a tenner day is a cakewalk.

Kinlochleven used to have an aluminum smelting plant, but now it's just an outdoorsy base camp.  The huge amount of water used in the plant had to be piped in from a reservoir over the next mountain, so a system of pipes and pumps kept us company for most of the rest of the walk.  The trail was a wide dirt road the whole way down as it was how heave trucks would get up and over; easy going, but quite uninteresting if you are on foot.  

Ah, but the beauty of all that elevation loss is that we were once again in the brambles.

We actually got to the pub before our bags did that day, and made some friendly chatter over a pint before exploring the town.

The former smelting plant?  Part of it was turned into a climbing center, with climbing walls reaching the ceiling, and uniquely, an ice climbing wall.  It was an huge walk-in freezer that you could shimmy your way up with ice axes and crampons.

The town itself was just orderly and neat, and we restocked supplies at the first grocery that we've seen in days.

This was also the night of the referendum vote.  We had seen graffiti and signs everywhere all week, and we knew we firmly in "yes" territory here.  It was all anyone could talk about.  

After a shower and a change of clothes, we decided not to have dinner at the pub, but at another place more than a mile away, just to have something to do.  It was nice to see the town and we found a trail that lead to a waterfall, so we hiked around in our flip-flops for a bit.

They actually had a "via ferrata" here and you could get outfitted to climb up the cliff to the top of the falls.

Me, I was content to sit at the deep pool at the bottom and give my feet a nice soak.  Remarkably, after 76 miles on the "official" trail (and many more off the trail), we had nary a blister between us.  My feet were tender and I had developed kankles over the miles, but we were in surprisingly good shape.  Much better than at this point when we were doing the Coast to Coast, but I'm sure the brutal heat and heavy packs had something to do with that.

We did enjoy some spectacular views with our evening meal, and a bit of sticky toffee pudding as well.  Earning dessert is something I look forward to every hike.

The worst part of the day was an empty dram.