LEJOG Day 78: Kingshouse to Kinlochleven

Weather: Partly sunny and warm

Distance covered today: 15.0km (9.3mi)

Last night's B&B: Edencoille Guesthouse (£50)

Cumulative distance: 1583.2km (983.8mi)/ % Complete: 82.7%

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 78 (click!)

The first objective of the day was to scale the fearsome sounding Devil’s Staircase, which ascends the 550m (1,800ft) pass between Kingshouse and Kinlochleven. In fact, as Phyllis had indicated to me and as echoed in my guide-book, the climb is not as troublesome as might have been anticipated. For a start, Kingshouse is already at an altitude of 250m (800ft), so that the climb is a mere 300m (1000ft), and it is made all the more gentle through an accommodating zigzag path which takes most of the sting out of it.

On my way up the pass I met Pierre from France whose path I had crossed a number of times yesterday and we chose to walk together for a while. He told me he is recently divorced from his Russian wife, because she already has two children and doesn’t want a third and he wants one of his own. She is apparently very beautiful and won’t have trouble attracting another mate, and my view is that Pierre won’t have too much of a problem either!  In any case, he was walking more slowly than I and he seemed to want to walk alone, so I left him to it and went on ahead.  Half-way up the pass, I met a granddad and his ten year-old granddaughter, making a cup of tea with a small burner. He offered me some if I had a cup, which I didn’t, and anyway I was in a rhythm and didn’t want to stop, so on I pushed. I met them again much later while I was looking around Kinlochleven and we had a brief chat. They were up from Glasgow for the day and were about to return. The poor kid looked exhausted, but it was quite clear that they have a close relationship, and I envied him his day in the sunshine with his grandchild. I hope I’m fit enough when and if I get the chance to take a grandchild on such adventures!

The views from the top were predictably spectacular. It is easy to become blasé about these mountain views, because every time one looks around, there is yet another terrific sight. To combat this, I imagined myself somewhere completely different while looking at the path and as I looked up again, I would be blown away by the majesty of it all.  From the top of the pass, looking northwards, I saw Ben Nevis, Britain’s highest mountain, for the first time. Appropriately, its summit was clothed in cloud. Tomorrow I will walk right past it, so it is preserving its secrets for my ultimate day on the WHW.  My only problem with the walk was again the sheer volume of foot traffic. Interestingly and most surprisingly, most of the visitors were foreign with hardly any English people around.

The way down was uneventful. I passed the reservoir, pipe-race and turbine hall of the hydro-electric scheme which powered the now-defunct aluminium smelting works which was the heart of Kinlochleven. The water cascades 300m (1,000ft) down to the turbines next to Loch Leven at sea-level through huge pipes and I followed them all the way in the distance. Having showered and recovered with a cup of tea, I returned to the town to look around. The closure of the smelter has been catastrophic for the town. It had operated for almost 100 years, but clearly the business model of importing bauxite from overseas for local smelting could not survive. The electricity from the hydro-electric plant has more value in the national grid than for smelting aluminium against world-scale competition from South America and elsewhere. My host tells me he used to work for the smelter, and he used his redundancy money to set up the B&B. It seems that catering for the West Highland Way clientele is the only business left in town, and even that can’t be very profitable. Most people are just passing through. They want a drink, a meal and an early night before setting out on the last leg of their journey. No wonder the town looks down at heel. There is of course a real effort to replace the smelter with public service offerings, but these are clearly just scratching the surface. It is a fact that the town makes nothing and grows nothing. There aren’t even any sheep on the inhospitable mountains. The smelter used to employ 1,000 people at its height. The hydro-electric plant can’t employ more than a dozen people and there is a small army barracks up on the hill and that’s it. It is the Liskeard of the North.

I have been wandering around in Scotland for three weeks now. Admittedly, I have on purpose read very little, and I shouldn’t be making the points I am about to make without a whole lot more basic research. There is though something to be said for the evidence of your eyes and I offer the following in all humility, happy to be struck down as a raving lunatic (or wild-eyed LEJOGer which is much the same thing!).

I think I am beginning to believe Alex Salmond has a point! He is undoubtedly a smart man, and I suspect that he knows what he is doing! What I have found in general is a much more prosperous Scotland than I expected.  I have also seen that the country is much more reliant on public services than the UK on average, and it is hardly surprising that in the midst of the savage downturn in the private sector, Scotland should come off initially less scathed than other parts of the Union.  I have also met many aspects of the entitlement culture in these parts.  There is no doubt that there is savage resistance to the reforms embraced by the Coalition.

I’m not going to get into the economics of North Sea oil, but as far as entitlement is concerned; whether it belongs to Scotland or to the UK is arguable ad nauseam.  In any case it is running out, and the UK has been criminally negligent in not investing the windfall for the future benefit of the country as a whole.  In any case, the argument is over.  The issue at stake now is what happens to the rest of the economy.  The fact is that I think there has been an unspoken but unholy alliance between the main political parties which has stabilised the current situation and led to the continuing subsidisation of Scotland by the rest of the Union. The Tories are terrified of Europe, in my view mistakenly, but the current Euro crisis is undoubtedly strengthening their resolve to keep their distance. They see the size of the Union as a critical issue in maintaining the UK as a big player in Europe. Northern Ireland will inevitably go at some point in the future; demographics will see to that. If Scotland goes as well, England and Wales will be decidedly a middle-ranking power in European circles. Britain’s status internationally would also suffer, so the Tories want the Union to survive.

Labour also can’t tolerate the dissolution of the Union. Support for Labour north of the border has been critical to Labour’s political position. Lose Scotland and the party can forget about forming a majority government at any time in the future without a radical change in its policies, and Tony Blair showed how difficult that would be.

So both the Tories and Labour have a huge vested interest in maintaining Scotland in the Union. The result has been a massive subsidisation of Scotland at the expense of tax-payers to the south.  The statistics show that there are proportionately far more publicly funded jobs north of the border. My own observations have confirmed that the infrastructure up here is in a far better state than it is in the south, especially that paid for by public money. And yet, speaking to people all over Scotland suggests that they do not agree. They want more.

Alex Salmond has other plans. Independence for Scotland would send a shock wave into the system and the cold wind of economic reality would soon become very obvious. Scotland would begin to understand the problems of Ireland, Greece and Portugal. The bills would become clear. Greece and Portugal seem to me incapable of digging themselves out of their holes, because their systems are so far-gone and corrupt that the truth will always be obscure. That is not true of Ireland and Scotland. The sooner their people understand the truth, the sooner they will accept the fundamental restructuring that will be necessary to produce the wealth that their people demand to live at the level of a developed economy. The people of Kinlochleven want public money to replace the private money that built and operated the smelter until it became unprofitable. Instead, they should be looking for private money to exploit the fabulous natural environment they have available to them, just as their colleagues to the south in the lowland belt should be using their fantastic canal for the same purpose.

English tax-payers are already becoming restive because of all the sacrifices their government is demanding of them. They will ultimately seek clarification of these public funding issues and when they do, the truth will cause a fundamental rethinking of the benefits of Union south of the border. They will demand comprehensive regional accounting, across education, health, and all public services. They will ask the questions about who is generating the wealth and who is spending it. This is currently a far-right banner issue, which scares many people, but as more and more people start to understand it, it will attract the interest of reasonable people in the centre, much the same as immigration has gravitated from the extreme to the centre as an issue.  Both the Tories and Labour must fear the effects of such a political tsunami.

My suggestion is that Alex Salmond already knows the game is up. If he can persuade the Scots to go along with him, even while retaining the Queen as Scotland’s Head of State, he will at present be able to extract from the English the best possible terms for dissolution.  Wait and the political winds will blow colder and colder, and the Scots will face a most unpleasant hangover. They could find themselves cast out of the Union to join Greece, Ireland and Portugal in a world in which their standard of living declines precipitously.

If I was a Scot, I’d vote for the Nationalists....

A cottage in an idyllic position below Buachaile Etive Mór

Buachaile Etive Mór

Pierre, from Lyon, France

Those tiny tree-trunks on the horizon are people at the top of the Devil's Staircase. It can just about be seen zigzagging its way up to the pass

My first view of Ben Nevis at full zoom from the top of the pass, its summit appropriately covered in cloud until I approach it tomorrow

Looking back down to the Gencoe Valley from the top of the pass

The Blackwater Reservoir, the last of the major civil constructions to have been built by Navvies and the source of water for the Kinlochleven hydroelectric power plant

At this point the WHW was crowded to the point of congestion, mostly by foreigners

The Lower Penstock which controls the flow of water into the pipes for the final plunge 300m (1000ft) down to the turbines. The water enters the pipes on the left through the teeth of that grid, and any surplus water cascades over the back edge into a relief stream

I found myself amongst a group of walkers who insisted I be suitably inducted in some sort of walking pole guard of honour!

That white mark is the pipe-race to the hydroelectric turbines below

Just outside Kinlochleven, the piperace enters the turbine hall. The defunct aluminium smelter yard can be seen in the background

One of the pipes was leaking. The pressure in the pipes at this point would be something like 29 bar (430psi) if the water was static

Derelict shops in devastated Kinlochleven

More empty shops next to a hairdesser and a co-op food store

The smelter building, now a subsidised climbing centre

A fly-fisherman on the right next to the tail-race of the hydroelectric system, where the water re-enters the burn having passed through the turbines and flows out into Loch Leven

European development money trying to stimulate economic activity. The "Industrial Estate" consisted of an electricians store and a laundry. The rest was empty 

Grandfather and granddaughter waiting for the bus to take them back to Glasgow. They had made it over the pass from Kingshouse

A surprisingly suburban street in Kinlochleven. There is no economic activity to support the residents