LEJOG Day 79: Kinlochleven to Fort William

Weather: Cloudy and warm

Distance covered today: 24.0km (14.9mi)

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

Cumulative distance: 1607.2km (998.7mi)/ % Complete: 84.0%

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 79 (click!)

In the context of the timeframe of this entire journey, the West Highland Way seems to have flashed by!  In fact it did only take a week, but the time seems to have flown even faster, no doubt sped on its way by good company and collectively the best scenery of the journey so far. The Way was demanding in places, but less so than both the Pennine Way and Offa’s Dyke, though I do have to qualify this in that I am fitter and stronger. Undoubtedly, the quality of the path itself was the highest I have experienced anywhere in Britain, both on this journey and before. My only complaints are that there were too many people on the Way for my personal preference and the quality of and welcome by some of the B&Bs en route was perhaps a little below the standard I have come to appreciate elsewhere (with the notable exception of the current one here in Fort William, which is superb!). Here again, it is logical that if your establishment is running at 100% occupancy and you are worked off your feet, some of the nuances of customer care may be stretched a tad at the margin. Even with these reservations, which are anyway timing related, the overall experience has been just great. You may not be planning LEJOG because you are sane, but you do have to do the West Highland Way before you die! There just isn’t any excuse for not doing it!

The last stretch this morning started with a collective bolt out of Kinlochleven at about 08:45 – 09:00.  It seems B&Bs prefer not to serve breakfast much before 08:00, and 30 minutes later, there is this mass exodus from all the B&Bs in town, with dozens of Gore-Tex encased fugitives heading for the uphill slopes that characterise the way out of almost every village on every trail. For me breakfast this morning was a particularly interesting affair as I found myself sitting with a classics professor and a poet from Minnesota, Clara and Bob. They were gracious and interesting, and like so many people I have met on the Way, just a little bit different. I think that is what is so absorbing about meeting people on this journey. They are the kind of person who fully accepts that having a holiday can include making an effort in sometimes uncomfortable surroundings, because the reward is as much to do with what one puts into it as what one gets out of it. And if that sounds a little “holier than thou”, I apologise and admit that I appreciate a little bit of luxury as much as anyone!!

Clara and Bob were most interested that I had spent a year in the US, and we discussed it briefly. Later, while I was struggling up the hill outside Kinlochleven, I could hear first a booming base and then ultimately a full-scale, high volume cascade of trance music. Eventually I came upon a small encampment of young people, presumably stoned out of their minds, one of whom had rigged up huge speakers and an amplifier to a generator and who was dancing his trance at 10:00 in the morning in the middle of the Scottish Highlands at some unspeakable number of decibels. They waved cheerfully as I trudged past and it made me think of the first and most famous of all outdoor music festivals, Woodstock, which I so narrowly missed on my trip to the US, and which formed the backdrop to my young adulthood.

As a scholarship student in America, I had a certain artificial status which brought me in contact with the sort of person who might have eluded the average American. I still think that I just happened to be in America in one of the most significant years of the last century. It was the year Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. It was the year of the Chicago Convention with all the extraordinary protest that surrounded that event. It was the year when the tide finally turned against the Vietnam War and the youth of America started to resist the draft in droves. In this respect it actually resembles this year with a strange sort of resonance in relation to the war in Afghanistan. It had particular significance for me because the family I was staying with at the time was divided between the generations on the issue. The parents firmly believed in the “Domino Theory” which believed that unless the West held out against the Communist advance in Vietnam, all the other democracies of Asia would fall like dominoes and the Communist advance would threaten America’s liberty. The kids believed it was an unjust war; an act of unjustified aggression in a foreign country in support of an illegitimate, undemocratic and corrupt regime; that it was strategically flawed and much more important, wrong in principle. It tore families apart. Kids escaped to Canada to avoid the draft; many went as far as Scandinavia. It was the subject of every discussion in school. It was unavoidable. And of course there was a glaring and offensive racial divide between the GIs who actually wound up in Vietnam and those who managed to avoid it.

It was also of course the year in which Richard Nixon ran for president against the discredited Lyndon Johnson. Because of my extraordinary status, I was invited to have breakfast with Nixon and his wife, Pat on one of their campaigning trips to the mid-west. Many of my student colleagues urged me to resist the invitation, just as much as the older generation thought that of course I should accept, but inevitably, I did go and I learned a salutary lesson, which has stayed with me all my life.  I found Richard and Pat Nixon to be amongst the most charming people I had ever met. They were completely interested in my story, fascinated by my origins, and completely gracious in their handling of the entire encounter. They were both under the most enormous pressure, with a campaign schedule that must have been literally frightening, yet still they found time to be really interested in a nonentity. Later, when Nixon was embroiled In Watergate, I often thought back to that morning. Of course, I am not commenting on his character, use of expletives, or even his policies, but the thing I learned is that you don’t get to be the candidate for President of the US for one of the major parties without being an extraordinary and charismatic person. There are just too many people who have to be influenced in person. There is just too much at stake.

As the media tore him to pieces over Watergate, and as his original and unsuccessful campaign against Kennedy was endlessly replayed on TV, including his 5 o’clock shadow, I couldn’t match the figure of my memory to the figure in the news. I learned that the media creates its own version of people and the reality may be very different. Over the years, I thought about this as I watched the media savage many politicians including individuals as diverse as Jimmy Carter, Michael Foot, George Bush and Tony Blair. I have no idea what these people were like in reality because I don’t know them, but by vilifying them to the extent that they do, I think the media are not only responsible for impugning their character, but in the longer term, by creating a pervasive cynicism about politicians in general, they may well weaken the democratic institutions that these people represent, ultimately to the detriment of all of us.

And after that pompous assertion, perhaps I should get back to my very much more mundane objective of preparing to take on the next great challenge of my journey, the Great Glen Way, which tears across Scotland to Inverness and which starts tomorrow!

Climbing out of Kinlochleven. The pipe-race is just visible at the top left and Loch Leven is on the right

Purple heather amongst the granite

The familiar way-marks of the West Highland Way: a thistle in an octagon

Loch Leven making its shimmering way out to the sea

The trance encampment. The sound equipment is in the tent and the fellow on the right was dancing. The others were huddled around a fire in the cool morning air

I passed Mary and Eddie along the way.Eddie is a retired fireman from Glasgow. They were doing the WHW for charity, and suffering sore feet. I know the feeling!

Moss covered stones in a stream. The water up here is crystal clear. I(t looks good enough to drink, though I have repeatedly been warned not to do so!

I was back on the Military Road which continues to wend its way through the Lairigmor Pass on the way to Fort William

A deserted farmhouse along the way. The sheep pens next to it are still in use

Around every corner, more beauty in the great Lairigmor Pass

The cairn on the right tells a story! After the Campbells and Argylls were defeated by Lord Montrose and the MacDonalds at the Battle of Inverlochy near Fort william, they were pursued by the MacDonalds across the Lairigmor. Eventually the Macdonalds gave up the chase near this point. If you support the MacDonalds you are supposed to add a stone to the cairn and if you support the Capmbells, you are supposed to take one away 

A loch amongst the hills

The colours of camoflage on the hillside

And still more crystal waterfalls

Shamrocks (?) in the forest

The forest was gorgeously dark and cool,

with a bed of shamrocks (?) for a floor

And wonderfully moss-tinted trees amidst the grey 

And finally, a close-up view of Ben Nevis, but still unfortunately, shrouded in cloud

Fort William, my destination for the day and the end of the fabulous West Highland Way